Have you ever heard of a skeuomorph? It’s a term we recently brought up in my design class. Basically, have you ever noticed how the icon for your phone doesn’t look like any phone produced nowadays? It’s an old phone. The icon is a skeuomorph: a piece of old, outdated technology that’s used as a symbol for its modern equivalent. We used to save everything to floppy disks, so that’s the symbol we associate with saving our data, even though a lot of us have never seen a floppy disk in our lives. The old informs the new. It’s almost instinctual.
I work at a pizza place near my house. It used to take me about twenty minutes to get there, but now it usually takes me a little over an hour. The route I take is kind of roundabout, but it gets me there and back. Naturally, between the job, the commute, and my online design courses, I don’t have all that much free time. Not since I changed my route. My old route got me there a lot quicker, but it took me through the woods.
I don’t go in the woods anymore.
Back then, I’ll admit it wasn’t fun to walk through the wooded trail in the dark after a late shift, but it beat the almost fifty extra minutes that going around the woods would take. If it meant fifty extra minutes warm in my apartment, I figured the twenty minutes of anxiety was worth it.
The path is mostly straightforward. It’s composed of a wide gravel pathway that snakes through the woods with pine trees overhead blocking out the stars. During the day it’s pretty peaceful, but at night the foliage is so thick it feels almost like walking through a cave. The air in the forest feels different from the air outside of it; thicker, like between you and the open air of the surface is a mile of solid rock.
The first few times I walked through the forest at night, I held my breath almost the entire time. The forest is dark. The darkness would be bad enough by itself, but the addition of all the hiding places a forest provides made it almost unbearable. The forest is at once a stifling cavern with its walls pressing against your tiny frame and a no man’s land where you’re visible to anyone from miles away. A million little eyes could be stalking you through the darkness and you wouldn’t be any the wiser.
The way I survived was simple. When I would walk through the woods, I wouldn’t think about it. I wouldn’t think about the nightmarish possibilities of what could be waiting for me in the brush just off the trail or behind the trees that my flashlight would briefly illuminate. For twenty minutes, I would pretend I was already at home. I was already sitting on the couch, remote in one hand and mug in the other, ready to look for whatever I was going to watch that night. I would imagine the warm glow of my living room lamp as I waded through the smothering darkness of the woods. The me that was walking through the forest was in the past, my real self already safe and simply remembering the walk through the woods that had led them to their comfortable present.
It was a very effective technique, which is why I noticed the whistling as late as I did.
I must have been walking for at least thirty seconds before I registered it. A high-pitched tune echoing through the trees up ahead. I stopped in my tracks when I finally realized what I was hearing. I’d passed people walking through the woods before, even people whistling, but this sounded off. Like a movie playing over a cheap speaker. The tune was jaunty and somewhat upbeat, but very rhythmic. Ordered. Most people whistle to relax, but this whistling seemed tense, almost forced.
I started walking again. I had passed by plenty of weirdoes on my nightly walks, and none of them had been dangerous so far. This guy was probably just enjoying his night. I was sitting at home remembering this funny little encounter as I sipped a mug of hot cocoa and watched an episode of Frasier I’d already seen. I was laughing at myself for thinking it was creepy, and already putting the whole experience out of my head.
As I thought about my present past, someone came into view. I paused. It wore a strange, wide hat that I couldn’t quite see except in silhouette, as well as a short coat that went down just below its thighs. It appeared to be carrying something with both hands.
A gun.
The realization was almost instinctual. I immediately ducked down, trying to make myself less visible. That compressed, jaunty tune crept out of the figure as it turned slowly towards me. I froze, hoping that I wasn’t visible. The figure continued turning on the spot, almost rotating in place, until it faced away from me again and started walking. I stared in complete bafflement. Its measured, deliberate gait finally clued me in as to what it was. It was someone dressed as an American colonial era soldier. A minuteman.
I would have laughed out loud if I hadn’t been fucking terrified a second ago. Was it a revolutionary war reenactor? In that case, the gun probably wasn’t even real. The figure continued walking down the path whistling what I now recognized as a marching tune. Now that I had gotten over the initial shock, I had to admit it was kind of catchy. At the very least, it was nice to have somebody else to walk with for once.
I walked behind the figure, keeping a healthy distance from them so they wouldn’t think I was stalking them. Their movements were so rigid, it was hard to believe I wasn’t watching an animatronic of some kind. They marched better than anyone I’d ever seen. Almost unconsciously, I matched their pace. One, two. One, two.
This was by far the strangest encounter I’d had in the woods. In my mind, I was already looking back at it, laughing to myself. I didn’t have too many interesting stories to tell people, so I was happy to have at least one that I could reliably break out for a while.
The figure kept walking. One, two. One, two.
The figure started whistling a different song. This one was much cheerier than the last. Had to have been an old song to raise soldiers’ spirits before battle. I hated to admit it, but it was actually putting a bit of a spring in my step. Fully in on whatever bizarre bit this was, I kept in step with the figure. One, two. One, two.
The whistling started to reach a crescendo. The notes the figure was hitting were genuinely impressive. I started swinging my arms in rhythm with the march. It was a great tune. I could tell he was nearing the end of a verse and was about to go right back into the chorus. I couldn’t help myself. I started trying to whistle along to the chorus.
One, two.
The figure stopped in its tracks and froze in place. I was surprised, but I guessed I probably shouldn’t blame him for being startled. I probably scared the crap out of the poor guy. Despite all of this, seeing the man stop in front of me made my stomach drop. I decided to lighten the tension. “Sorry, man,” I said, “didn’t mean to scare you. You’re, uh, quite a whistler.”
The figure stood in front of me, still unmoving. I had this feeling in my chest that I’d done something horribly wrong, and whatever it was could never be fixed.
Suddenly, the figure exploded with movement. It sprinted to the side, almost faster than my eyes could track it, and disappeared into the brush.
A bolt of electricity shot through my head. I whirled around, frantically scanning my surroundings with my flashlight. The bushes around me created tangled shadows in the light, but nothing human-shaped. I heard a rustling and whipped my flashlight toward it. I couldn’t see anything. I listened to the sounds around me. Silence. No other rustling in the woods, no birdcalls, no owls, not even a faraway dog barking. If I hadn’t seen the minuteman with my own eyes, I would think I was the only living thing in this entire forest.
Some part of me wanted to believe I’d never seen it. To believe that this was just another walk home through the forest. I was in my living room, remembering the waking nightmare I’d imagined. To think I could let such an odd thing scare me. What the hell was a minuteman doing here? I figured I’d never know, since I made it home safe and would never see the minuteman again.
I remembered putting one foot in front of the other, the crunch of the gravel under my feet like the cracking of fireworks in the still, quiet air. I remembered the silence screaming in my ears; the anticipation, almost hope, of hearing something, anything, to break it. The cold realization that as quiet as I could be, as quickly as I could move, there was no way it would have let me out of its sight when it dashed into the bushes. It could see me. There was no way it couldn’t.
I sat safe at home, remembering how scared I was. How sure I was that I was going to die that night. The relief that I felt when I crossed the threshold from the darkness outside to the welcoming lights of my apartment.
The numbing terror when I realized that it could have followed me.
Just like that, the illusion fell away. I was still in the forest. There was no safety anymore. There would be no safety ever again. I knew the minuteman, and the minuteman knew me. It could learn where I lived, where I went during the day, when I slept, all the best entrances to my apartment building, everything that it needed.
I heard more rustling. I turned my flashlight to the base of a tree but saw nothing.
I took a deep breath. I put one foot in front of the other. I was starting to lose myself to the panic. I was back at my apartment. I had made it home safely because the minuteman didn’t kill me because…
Why wouldn’t the minuteman kill me?
The minuteman didn’t want to kill me. I scared the minuteman, and it ran away. It thought I would kill it. We were both scary men in the woods.
Why was I thinking of the minuteman as an it? It was just a person in a costume. It wasn’t an it, it was a he. It was just a man. My reaction to the minuteman was primal. It was an instinctual sort of fear that I couldn’t rationalize. I had no idea where it came from, and I had no idea why it terrified me so much.
I heard a branch fall behind me. I pointed my flashlight up, and I understood.
The minuteman clung to the side of a tree like a gigantic spider. I couldn’t see its face at this distance, but I knew from the angle of its tricorn hat that it was looking directly at me.
I screamed and ran as fast as I could. I heard a loud rustle in the bushes, like something hit the ground hard. I pointed the flashlight back. The bushes behind me shook as something galloped through them. I looked ahead of me. I didn’t want to see it again. I heard the crunch of gravel behind me. They were faster than my own footfalls, almost twice as fast. Whatever was making them was running on all fours.
I was not back in my apartment. I was in the forest in the middle of the night, running as fast as I could because if I did not run fast enough, I would die. There would be no one to remember this. No one except the thing in the woods that killed me.
I saw the opening in the trees that led out of the woods. The crunching of gravel was getting closer behind me. Any second now, I would feel a hand around my ankle or claws raking against my back. I put everything into one last sprint. Everything inside of me that wanted to live shot downwards into my legs. I didn’t think I could go any faster, but I did. The end of the forest was getting closer. I was almost free.
The open air felt almost like plunging into icy water. I could see so far in so many directions. I had emerged from the underworld. Naturally, I looked back.
The path was empty.
I continued running until the forest was almost out of sight. I didn’t care that I could be followed at that point. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t this world of darkness and terror. I didn’t care if my apartment was safe or not. I wanted to be there.
The fifth time I turned around and saw nothing behind me, I started to slow a little bit. The adrenaline was starting to wear off and it was being replaced with pure exhaustion. I slowed to a walk. I scanned the houses around me, looking for a shape in the yard or, God forbid, clinging to the roof. I didn’t see one. I glanced frantically around me until I heard it.
A lone, piercing howl ripped through the air, coming from the forest I’d fled from. Instinctually, I knew. It was the minuteman. The cry was a warning. It was something inhuman, something ancient. I felt it deep in my bones, in the genetic memories of my ancestors. This was something to be feared by humanity. Something old and obscure, but not forgotten and certainly not gone.
I never walked through the park again, even in broad daylight.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the encounter recently. All the recent discussions in my design class got me thinking. Whatever this was in the woods, why did it look like a minuteman?
All I can come up with is that this is something that’s been around for a long time. Something that doesn’t want to be bothered by humans. Maybe it looks like a minuteman because minutemen were defenders. The thing I encountered in the forest that night was a skeuomorph. Something that took the form of a symbol from hundreds of years ago to send an instinctual message: leave it the hell alone or face the consequences.
But one thing still bothers me. I live on the west coast. I’m nowhere near New England. What the hell is a minuteman doing here?
I see two likely possibilities. One is that this thing moved all the way across the country without being exposed by humanity. If that’s the case, its ability to hide is incredible, and its lifespan is very long. I escaped from something impossible that night, and I should never set foot in that forest again.
The second possibility is far more terrifying to me: it didn’t migrate, it spread. It started in New England and slowly spread across the country, becoming an invasive species. Who am I to say it’s not everywhere now? If this is the case, I didn’t encounter a monster that night. What I encountered was a natural predator.
I don’t go into the woods anymore. They don’t belong to us.