I’ve always hated the forest behind my house. The dense canopy of trees blocks any sunlight from breaking through and hitting the ground, turning it into a murky abyss of roots and brush that would grab at the legs of anyone brave enough to be passing through. My bedroom window faces out towards that forest. In the mass of trees, shadows dance and form mysterious shapes in the darkness, provoking a deep sense of unease within me. At night, I could swear I have seen silhouettes of strange and bizarre creatures sculking around, just past the treeline. As if they’re watching me, waiting. I don’t know what for. That is why I have always hated the forest behind my house.
I don’t go in the garden. The forest backs directly onto our land. I would feel the shadows dancing towards me, closer and closer, until it’s too late to escape.
My family thinks I have an overactive imagination. That the forest isn’t as dark as I think, and that there is nothing lurking in there waiting for me to let my guard down so it can hurt me, or kill me, or eat me. That nineteen years old is too old for this crap. I don’t care.
Something is out there. Something nasty.
My younger brother, Kyle, likes to make fun of me. He’s only a year younger than me, and having grown up so close in age, he knows very well how to get under my skin. Ever since I warned him about the shadows years ago, he has made fun of me for it. Last year, he tricked me into the forest and left me there when I wasn’t looking. Alone and afraid, I could feel the suffocating darkness closing in on me from all around, the shadows lurking within. I could feel something brushing against my shins, almost wrapping itself around me, before my dad managed to pull me out and carry me home.
I didn’t know what it was that I had felt. Not at the time. It must have been slithering through the knee-high brush, invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking out for it. It felt prickly against my legs and left deep scratches. Unsurprisingly, by my parents, this was chalked down to being thorns. Thorns. No, I know what I felt, and it wasn’t any damn thorns! It felt warm and fleshy, like the skin of some unimaginable creature, with spines along its body. I had also briefly felt something rough and wet, which left a long scrape around my ankle that was not unlike a road rash. This was the first time that the shadows had manifested themselves physically to me. It was the moment I knew that what I had been seeing all these years wasn’t some trick of the imagination, twisting the darkness and manipulating my eyes into seeing what wasn’t there.
After that day, the shadows were not just shadows anymore. If I looked out of my bedroom window at night, I could see the fleshy body of what I now realised was just one creature stalking through the forest in the dark, having previously taken the forms of many differently shaped shadows as the moon positioned itself at different points across the sky throughout the night. It was pale, almost humanoid in shape but abnormally tall and very skinny. I could see its eyes bulge as its head twitched from side to side, scanning its surroundings like a starving animal hunting for prey. Its head was long, and the creature had no hair. But the mouth, the mouth was the worst part. The creature’s mouth wrapped right the way across the front of its face and opened so wide it’s as if its whole face was peeling open to reveal rows upon rows of short but razor-sharp teeth. But the most disgusting part of its mouth was the tongue. Its tongue was as wide as its face and twice as long. It’s no wonder its mouth had to open so wide.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get even worse, I noticed it had begun to come closer. What used to stalk behind the treeline was now gradually further in front of it each night. A couple of weeks ago, I could see the top of its head stood behind my garden fence. My garden fence that is seven feet tall. A few nights ago, I saw it in my garden on all fours, rooting through the trash with its tongue. I felt sick. What was I going to do? If it came any closer it would be practically in my bedroom.
Stupidly, I decided to confide in my brother. Yeah, he made fun of me, but who else could I go to? My parents were on the verge of sending me to the psych ward, and my friends laughed at me whenever I brought it up. Plus, I know that he’d seen it too. He denied it around my parents because of how they reacted to me bringing it up, but he admitted last week to seeing it in the garden at the same time I did.
His idea a couple days later makes me wish I had never told him.
Because Kyle told me he wanted to go and hunt it down.
I told him that was the stupidest damn idea he’d ever had, that we would get ourselves killed, and there was no way I was stepping foot in that forest. His excuse was that there was two of us, and two were stronger than one, but I thought that when it’s two teenagers against a supernatural being, we stood no chance.
But of course, being the asshole that he is, my brother told my parents he was taking me out into the forest to conquer my fear once and for all. I knew that he had done it so I couldn’t back out, and just as he intended, they practically forced me to go with him despite my protests.
Yes, I know. I don’t need to be told that this was really, really dumb.
So, we ventured. Deeper and deeper we went into the darkness, brush and roots reaching out for us as we passed by. I had an awful sinking feeling. Once far enough away from the house, Kyle stopped me. He reached into the bag he had brought and produced a shotgun.
I was stunned. Dad would kill him if he found out. But I couldn’t complain about that kind of defence.
In the forest, I kept hearing noises around us, and seeing movements out of the corner of my eye. I tried to calm down by telling myself that it only came out at night, but I still felt as unsafe as I ever had.
As dusk began to fall, I begged Kyle to turn back, and reluctantly he agreed it would be too dark to find our way back if it got too late. However, we were too late.
Darkness fell faster than we could have imagined, and soon enough we were holding onto each other so we didn’t get separated. There was no way we were ever going to find our way home in this. I could feel panic growing stronger inside me. I knew that it would be out, and even if we did make it home the thing might be in our garden again.
Frightening noises grew stronger the further we walked, and the more uneasy we became. I was terrified at this point. It was made worse when out of the darkness, something grabbed hold of my ankle. Judging by the noise he made, something had grabbed Kyle’s too. Suddenly we were ripped apart and flung in opposite directions, into the pitch black and away from the safety of each other. I landed in a heap among a pile of leaves and sticks, and I could hear Kyle screaming in the distance. I had no idea how far we had been thrown, but he sounded farther away by the second. By now I had realised that the creature had found us, and sounded as though it was dragging Kyle along with it, wherever it was going. Adrenaline pumped through me. I hauled myself up off the ground and sprinted after the sound of my brother’s distressed cries, not thinking about what I would do if I caught up to them. A shotgun blast echoed through the trees, making my ears ring. Was that him? I mean, who else could it have been? My legs were stinging from all the cuts I gained while running through the brush, but I kept going, determined to find Kyle.
After a few minutes, his cries drifted too far away for me to hear anymore. I fell to my knees, defeated and terrified. I felt my way through the forest and found an opening in a tree. Sobbing, I curled up inside and hoped that I would make it to dawn.
Hours later, it was even darker than when Kyle and I had been separated. I had somehow managed to fall asleep in my little tree-hole, but I was awoken by a loud crunch nearby.
I held my breath.
Could it be Kyle? Or could it be the creature, now on the prowl looking for me, having caught and done unthinkable things to my brother. I didn’t want to imagine where Kyle was right now.
Tears of terror welled up in my eyes as two large white orbs slowly peered from the right and into my tree-hole, looking directly at me.
Shit.
It was looking directly at me, and I could have sworn that a glimpse of a smile appeared across its disgusting mouth as its tongue lashed at my face.
I screamed.
It was like no pain I had ever felt before. Like acid-coated sandpaper, it felt as though it had taken off a chunk of my face. There was no time to assess the damage before it lashed at me again, gripping my ankle and yanking me out of the hole, dragging me through the brush. It was so fast. My already wounded face was pulled through the dirt and twigs on the forest floor, and from somewhere nearby another gunshot rang out.
What the hell? There’s no way that could be Kyle…right?
The creature wasn’t fazed. It continued to haul me across the ground. At some point, my head crunched against a rock in the mud, and I blacked out.
I don’t know how long I was out. I awoke strung up in a dingy, wet cave, my body aching and stinging. It reeked, although I couldn’t figure out what the smell was. It was almost metallic…and meaty? There was a wet sound coming from somewhere nearby, which filled me with dread, and as my eyes adjusted to the light level of the cave, I saw the source of it. It was the creature. I held my breath. It was crouching over something and…eating it? The sound was sickening. As I focused on it, I realised I could see a pair of legs limply slumped behind where the creature was crouched.
No.
I let out a small sob as I saw that the creature was crouched over my barely recognisable brother, and as I then realised what the stench in the cave was. Its head whipped around as I noticed it had heard me. When its head moved I could see its tongue hanging out of its revolting mouth, smeared with dark red blood and chunks of flesh. And behind the tongue I then spotted the mangled mess of Kyle.
It had been licking him.
Licking his flesh off. Like a human popsicle.
Kyle lay there limply, one eye open and staring towards me, indicating that he was still alive. Parts of his face were caved in and his open eye was half bulging out where some of the flesh around it had been licked away. As the creature turned, I could see Kyle’s body, twitching and bloody. I couldn’t imagine the pain he was in. I could see the dull white glint of a bone in his leg, among all the exposed tendons and muscle. His clothes hung in shreds and he was caked in blood and dirt. I was so focused on Kyle, terrified of the condition he was in, that I hadn’t noticed the creature slowly stalking towards me on all fours, low to the ground. I had now realised that this was the thing that had slithered past my shins in the brush last year. If my dad hadn’t saved me, I would have been where Kyle is now.
The creature crouched in front of me and its tongue hung out of its revolting mouth. Blood thickly coated its tongue and chin, dribbling onto the ground, and fleshy chunks clung to its mouth and the spines on its tongue, which I could see up-close was composed of many tiny, sharp spikes. Its eyes moved downwards to my stomach, which had been exposed as my shirt ripped when I was dragged along the ground. I realised it was now going to start licking off my flesh.
The creature slowly dragged its tongue along the skin of my stomach, and I screamed in agony. I can’t even describe how it felt. A smile crept across its mouth as it continued to lick, peeling off layer by layer of skin and then flesh. The pain was so severe that I began to drift in and out of consciousness. I was just awake enough to suddenly hear a crunch from my right, just near the entrance of the cave, then an ear-piercing bang which echoed and lingered in the confined cave. Simultaneously, a warm splatter of blood hit my face and the creature let out a devilish screech, before another bang rang out and the screeching ceased. I heard a man’s voice echo,
“Fucking hell…”
I hit the floor and blacked out again.
That’s the last thing I remember before waking up here, in the hospital. A large, padded gauze bandage covers the rough mess of my stomach, which is still tender and stinging. I haven’t seen it, and frankly I don’t want to. The doctors are saying I’ll need a skin graft on my face. I don’t yet know what became of Kyle, or if he’s even alive, but it’ll be a miracle if he’s able to recover from the state I saw him in.
The hospital staff told me that the man I heard before passing out was a hunter who saw the creature stalking us, and then dragging us, through the forest. He had tried to shoot at it twice, once when it had Kyle, and once when it had me. He’d been nearby when I started screaming and found us.
I have my doubts about whether it’s dead. All I do know is that I will be here in the hospital for quite a while. I’ll be safe if it survived. I mean, I really hope so. We never should have gone into the forest.