I run a private campground. I treat winter as a time to stay indoors with a cozy book and some hot chocolate. I wouldn’t say I relax, not with all the various winter monsters that lurk in the woods, and especially not this year. But with spiders crawling in my lungs every night (no I’m not letting you forget about that particular visual) I’ve at least bought myself some breathing room. (hah)
If you’re new here and internally screaming after reading that, you should really start at the beginning, and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
I did get to curl up with a good book by the fireplace, at least. Or rather, a journal that’s been printed on the world’s shittiest office printer. Seriously, this thing had to recalibrate itself three times (and whose idea was to make the calibration page print in color? Color ink is expensive and money is tight around here, asshole) and I had to reinstall the drivers once.
I really wanted to drag it outside and beat it to within an inch of its life. And then beat it some more, throw its remains in the dumpster, and go buy a new one made by ANYONE OTHER THAN HP. The only thing that saved the printer’s life is that it is still very cold outside and now there’s a windchill making it even worse.
But it finally got the job done and now I can go back to pretending it doesn’t exist until it infuriates me again. I swear I have Stockholm syndrome with this thing because I say this every time it malfunctions and I’ve had it for three years.
I’m looking for specific information in this journal. I have a hunch on how to deal with the thorns. I just need a way to act on it and I’m hoping this will give me some ideas. Instead, I found myself getting sidetracked and reading whatever was in front of me, for pages and pages. I finally gave up and started at the beginning.
I feel I should share one of his… adventures… with all of you.
My ancestor’s writing is effusive. It flows from page to page as he captures the grief and the pain he felt down on paper. Were I to merely recite the facts, this post would only be a few paragraphs. I feel that would do a disservice to my ancestor. His words were not merely to record, they were to capture his emotions at what he experienced and to evoke those same feelings in generations to come.
My mother married into this family. I wonder if that is what attracted her to this book and why she kept coming back to it, more than what clues the contents might hold. It was the context she didn’t have from not growing up with the stories, from not hearing the relatives talk about people long passed, their names etched on the tombstones in the family graveyard. It wove her into the tapestry of our family in a way mere marriage may not.
I have sometimes criticized my late uncle for his tendency to embellish his stories. He obscured the facts, I felt. It was difficult to tell what was rooted in reality and what was a complete fabrication. Yet now, after reading the pages sent to me from the university student, I wonder if there was another purpose to his stories. Storytelling is a function of community. It builds social norms, it tells us what our values are, and it warns us what is taboo. I intended to use it myself as a tool to educate people, although I swore I wouldn’t make things up like my uncle sometimes did.
Perhaps my uncle sought to impart upon his listeners a different sort of lesson than the mere facts. Would I have understood - or even cared about - my great-uncle’s rage that drove him to try to run over the children with his pickup truck? Doubtful. But even as a surly preteen, I felt that terrified desperation he must have felt as the tree pressed in around him, breaking his bones and crushing his skull. A reminder that we must not be complacent. That we must fear these creatures, at all times.
Or perhaps I am overthinking this and my uncle simply liked the attention a well-elaborated story brought him.
Regardless of the reason, I think I need to honor my ancestor’s intention. I will tell this story with as much detail as I would tell one of my own, even if it means I must fill in the gaps.
His name was Mattias. There is no headstone for him in the graveyard, merely a small marker. I can only assume that this means there was no body to bury.
He married and they had a handful of children. He wrote of them rarely, at one point saying, ‘I feel I am a poor father. I spend my hours with books, monsters, and demons instead of my own blood. But I cannot bear to look upon them, knowing the heartache they will endure when I am gone.’
Mattias was convinced he would die young. This sentiment is echoed throughout the journal, a resignation that haunted his waking hours and tormented his nights.
‘My friends say I am melancholy. They bid me to have some spirit, and invoke God in their reasoning. But there are no gods in these woods and God does not look upon our family. I wonder what we have done to deserve such ill treatment, but I do not say this to them, not when they merely want to have a drink or three with pleasant company.’
There is so much in here of interest. However, I will start with the story that I think all of you will most want to hear.
Mattias killed the lady with extra eye’s predecessor.
There is no mention of the lady in chains. I… think I know why this is, now that I’ve read this account.
Mattia’s relationship with the lady with extra eyes was difficult. He did not trust her like I so naively did, but he didn’t seem to have a good reason for it. I think there was less familiarity with these creatures back then. Relationships were hostile. While the lady hadn’t done anything malicious against him, he was suspicious of her motives and sometimes wrote of her as if she were an evil thing.
‘I feel her eyes upon me. She watches me when I venture into the woods. Her kin skulk in the shadows of my house. I cannot keep them away. Does she take me for a fool? Does she think I do not see the malice in her eyes? She has enough of them with which to betray her intentions.’
I admit at this point in the journal I began to wonder if perhaps he had started all of this with his own paranoia. If he’d interpreted the presence of the spiders as ill intent and sought the lady out and murdered her for nothing more than his own fantasies. People have done terrible things on flimsier conspiracies. And he refers to her not as ‘the lady with extra eyes’, but ‘the witch in the woods.’
Those were different times, back then. They believed these creatures acted according to their nature, as we do now, but they also believed those natures were born of evil.
Still, her help was invaluable. He was having to deal with these creatures and her advice - and sometimes material assistance - made the difference in some life or death situations. He sought her out - reluctantly - even though her very presence caused friction with the rest of the town. It seems some things never change.
‘They say I conspire with the witch,’ he wrote. ‘I say they should learn to deal with these creatures themselves, then, if they dislike my methods.’
Yep. Some things never change, including my family’s attitude problem.
His fears were valid, though. Our family was respected due to how long we’d been here on this land, but back then we didn’t have the economic pull we have now. And I don’t know a whole lot about the traditions of the time, but I do know that in Slavic culture, disasters such as crop failure are handled by finding the local sorcerer and beating the ever living shit out of him. And we do have a family from that region living here, though I’m not sure when they immigrated.
Still. The advantage her assistance gave him was enough to take the risk. And then his firstborn died.
They found him in the morning, lifeless in his bed. Mattias writes his actions that came next in a cold, clinical tone, all emotion stripped away in the wake of a grief so intense it robbed him of his reason. He dragged the boy’s body outside, a fair distance from the house, and he cut it open. This was an unnatural death, he reasoned. Surely he would find some unnatural thing inside to explain what had happened. His wife screamed at him to stop, but he ignored her, seized by this notion that he’d find the answers he so desperately wanted to explain the loss of his son.
And he did. The blood was sluggish and yellowed in color.
It reminded him of tea.
He confronted the lady. She met him in her house and offered him tea. He threw it aside and demanded to know why she’d killed his boy. The lady bowed her head in sorrow and told him that it was a quiet, painless death. She’d given him some tea and cookies and sent him home to die in his sleep. The best she could offer him.
“But why?” Mattias raged. “Aren’t you a friend to this family? I defend your existence to the town and this is how you reward my loyalty?”
“Friend?” Her eyes snapped up to meet his. “I do not keep human customs. Your son harbored intentions that would destroy this land.”
Based on the family records, the boy was close to the age he would leave home, marry, whatever, when he died. I wonder what he did that so offended the lady. Perhaps he intended to sell the land someday.
Regardless of the reason, Mattias was enraged. He attacked the lady. I suspect you all can predict how that turned out for him.
‘She revealed her true face to me,’ he wrote. ‘Monstrous legs sprouted from her back, holding her body aloft as if it were nothing more than a doll. I fled and no sooner had I escaped the house did she erupt from it behind me, her legs stabbing violently into the ground as if they were spears.’
Mattias ran. He had not drunk the tea, so he was not poisoned and weak. Also, he had a terribly brilliant idea to throw off pursuit. While he at least was more suspicious than me, he apparently had less self-preservation than I do. Probably was why he felt he would die young.
As he ran through the woods, he realized that the lady was gaining on him. He heard the clicking of her horrid legs, like that of a clock, growing steadily louder. He did not dare look back. He ran as if his heart would burst, lacking a viable weapon, lacking any recourse other than flight. But he had not completely abandoned his reason and he directed his path back to the house along a certain route, up a certain hill and out of the deep woods.
He pulled his way up that steep incline by the young trees, his lungs afire, fearing that at any moment one of those spindly legs would stab through his chest, the point dripping with his own lifeblood. But he made the crest of the hill and with one last desperate bit of effort, he clambered up and over the mound of sticks and debris.
That’s right. He vaulted the thing in the dark.
And he grabbed a stick on his way down the other side.
‘I thought only to arm myself,’ he wrote. ‘The mound houses something terrible, that much is certain. It brings the darkness when it emerges. But I did not think that it would take offense so easily to have its house vandalized in such a small way. Do not branches fall off it in the storm? What difference would one being snatched away by a mere mortal make? Still, the creature felt its theft, and it woke, and thus accomplished my purpose in directing my flight across its home.’
Hate to break it to you Mattias, but that mound isn’t its home. It IS the thing in the dark and you did the equivalent of ripping out a toenail.
The thing in the dark came alive with a roar that reverberated through the ground. Mattias was thrown forwards, his arms pinwheeling for balance. Still, he was already in full flight and wasn’t about to let a stumble stop him. His momentum kept him going forwards, staggering almost on all fours for a moment or two, and then he was up and sprinting again even as the aftershocks of the thing in the dark’s rage trembled under his feet.
Behind him, the lady with extra eyes screamed in thwarted anger. Mattias didn’t look back. He only assumed that those two creatures were facing off, for neither of them pursued him further.
He didn’t write about the terrible destruction that would ensue if the thing in the dark ever got in a fistfight around here, so I can only assume after a bit of frustrated arguing over who got to rip Mattias limb from limb the lady capitulated her chase and invited the thing in the dark home for some tea.
Some time passed. He did not seek his revenge on the lady right away, mostly because he couldn’t find her house. But oh, he searched. It became his obsession. He went into the woods as often as he could and he wrote of the wonders and the horrors he found there. And all the while, his writing grew more frenetic as he spiraled closer to what he thought was an understanding of the land in its entirety. As if such a thing could be understood by human minds. He raved about many things. The places that were in-between. The forest of ash he saw only in the corners of his eye. The sea of mud. The decaying hall. A basement. Some of these I think I know about. The rest… I’m not so certain. He spoke of these places with rage, the places where monsters dwell, issuing forth from their lairs to prey upon us.
And he spoke of the spiders. Always the spiders, watching as he skirted along the edges of places he should not know about and should not go.
‘I am getting too close to the heart of this all,’ he wrote. ‘I can think of no other reason for her rage. But what sort of grudge does she carry against this family, for such a thing to invite wrath?’
He agonizes over this question for some time. In the end, he could only come up with one reason. Trespass. He was encroaching into areas that mortals did not belong and so she dealt out retribution for it.
Unfair, cruel rules. Who was she, to say where he would go? Who was she, to defy mankind? He vowed to kill her, both for that, and to avenge his slain son.
Then he wrote a letter to send to his sister so that she would know what he was about to do. The letter that my brother found, the one that referenced ‘a torch from the dark.’
It does not say why he thought to light the branch. He’d saved it, realizing it was something important if it could anger the thing that lived under the mound. It makes me think of the rare occasion that I have known what to do, guided only by symbolism and intuition. Perhaps he’d honed that sense, to the point he no longer thought to write down his guesses and viewed them as common knowledge. His writing does grow steadily more erratic as the journal progresses.
Mattias went into the woods with the torch. He located her house. He entered silently and found the lady kneeling by the hearth, preparing her kettle for the fire. Then he came up behind her, seized the chain from which her kettle hangs, and strangled her with it.
He buried her behind her house and his journal never mentions the witch in the woods again. But after this, later generations speak of a lady in chains weeping and calling for help to anyone that passes by. A cursed aspect, exacting a bloody retribution on the humans that slew her.
I’m a campground manager. I know this land. But it seems there are places that exist alongside this campground, places that I don’t know very well at all.
Now let me make this clear before I get a bunch of comments. This house doesn’t have a basement. It’s been partially rebuilt a number of times now for renovations and extensions, so I doubt there’s much left of the original structure. Even a sealed off basement would have been discovered. I’m wondering if this isn’t the only old house on this land, though. Perhaps there was another one that was leveled and covered up. Knowing my luck it’s beneath the concrete slab we had poured when we turned the barn into the camp store.
As for the other locations… the decaying hall could be the vanishing house, I suppose. The sea of mud we’ve seen, when I went to kill the hammock monster. The forest of ash is likely the gray world, though it sounds like he never entered it, at least, not before he vanished forever.
I wonder what other places exist alongside this world. The in-betweens, he called them. Neither heaven nor hell nor earth, but somewhere else, forgotten and disused. A place where the inhuman things of this world found refuge and rest.
He would tear them all down, he said, if he were but given the power to do so. [x]