I would sit at my bedroom window late at night and listen to the sounds of the forest. I learned to distinguish the hooting of owls, the flapping of bat wings, the panicked scurrying of small things seeking to eat without being consumed in their turn. All of these elements were familiar to me, and they lulled me to sleep. This was my world, and for a time there was nothing in it that was not known to me.
Yet I recall one night when all seemed quiet, when it appeared that everything living in the darkness below had momentarily stifled a breath, and as I listened I sensed a presence moving through the consciousness of the forest, searching, hunting. A wolf howled, a quaver in its tone, and I could hear the fear communicated in its cry. Within moments, the howl turned to a whine, rising in pitch until it resembled a scream before it was suddenly cut off forever.
And the wind blew the curtains, as if the woods had at last released their breath.
It seemed that we lived our lives at the very edge of civilization, aware always that beyond us lay the wildness of the forest. When we played in the schoolyard, our cries hung in the air for a moment, then seemed to be sucked into the dense woods, our childish voices wandering lost between the trees before fading at last into nothingness. But beyond that tree line, a creature waited, and it drew our voices from the air like a hand plucking an apple from a tree, and it devoured us in its mind.
There was a light dusting of snow upon the ground, the earliest fall of winter, when first I saw it. We were playing in a field by the church, chasing a red leather ball that stood out like blood upon the whiteness of the ground. A gust of wind arose where no wind had been before. It carried the ball upon it until it came to rest in a patch of young alders some distance into the forest. Unthinkingly, I followed.
As soon as I passed beyond the first of the great fir trees, the air around me grew colder and the voices of my companions were lost to me. Dark growths of fungus hung upon the shaded sides of the trees, close to the ground. I saw a dead bird lying at the base of one such cluster, its body collapsed in upon itself and seepage from the mushrooms frozen above it in a yellow, glotted mass. There was blood on its beak, and its eyes were tightly closed, as though the bird were lost forever in the remembrance of its final pain.
I moved farther into the forest, the imprint of my passing trailing behind me like an unseen rank of lost souls. I parted a cluster of alders and reached for the ball, and as I did so, the wind spoke to me. It said:
“Boy. Come to me, boy.”
I looked around, but there was no one near me.
The voice came again, closer now, and in the shadows before me, a figure moved. I thought at first that it was the branch of a tree, so thin and dark was it, its frame wreathed in gray as if spiders had spun a thick skein across it. But the branch reached out, and the twigs of its fingers gathered and beckoned. Waves of strange desire emanated from it. They washed over me like the tides of a polluted sea, leaving me filthy and soiled.
“Boy. Beautiful boy. Delicate boy. Come, boy, embrace me.”
I grabbed the ball and backed away, but my foot caught on one of the twisted roots beneath the snow. I fell heavily on my back and a light thread touched my face: it was a gossamer strand of web, strong and sticky, which clung to my hair and seemed to coil around my fingers as I tried to push it away. Then a second fell, and a third, heavier now, like the filaments of a fishing net. Dim light speared through the trees, and thousands of floating strands were revealed. From the shadows where the gray being waited, line upon line of web floated, so that the figure appeared to be disintegrating, shedding itself upon me. I struggled and opened my mouth to cry out, but the threads were falling thickly now and they descended upon my tongue and tangled themselves around it so that I could not speak. The being advanced, silver web heralding its approach, and the mesh seemed to tighten upon me as I moved.
With all the strength that I had, I pushed myself backward upon the ground and felt the strands catching on the roots, tearing apart and freeing me from their grasp. Branches scratched my face and snow gathered in my boots as I burst through the tree line, the ball still in my hands.
And as I drew away, that voice came again:
“Boy. Beautiful Boy.”
And I knew that it wanted me, and that it would not rest until it had savored me.
That night, I could not sleep. I recalled the web, and the voice from the darkness of the forest, and my eyes refused to close. I twisted and turned, but I could find no rest. Despite the cold outside, the room was unbearably warm, so that I was forced to kick the sheet from my body and lie naked upon the bed.
Yet I must have drifted into sleep, for it seemed that something caused my eyes to flicker open, and I found the light in the room was no longer what it had been. There were shadows in the corners where no shadows belonged. They shifted and twisted, but the trees outside remained undisturbed, and the curtains on the windows hung still and unmoving.
And then I heard it: a soft, low voice, like the rustling of dead leaves.
“Boy.”
I rose up suddenly, my hands reaching for the sheet to cover my body, but the sheet was gone. I looked around and saw it lying discarded beneath the window. Even in my worst thrashings, I could not have sent it so far from my bed.
“Boy. Come to me, boy.”
In that corner, a presence seemed to hover. At first, it was almost shapeless, like an old blanket that has begun to rot, and strands of spiderweb filigreed themselves upon it. The moonlight illuminated folds of faded, wrinkled skin that hung across its stick-thin arms like old bark. Ivy curled around its limbs and wreathed the thin fingers that now beckoned to me from the shadows. Where its face might have been, there were only dead leaves and darkness-except at its mouth, where small, white teeth glistened.
“Come to me, boy,” it repeated. “Let me hold you.”
“No,” I said. I curled my legs up before me, trying to make myself as small as possible, to expose to it as little of my body as I could. “No. Go away.”
At the ends of its fingers, an oval shape glittered. It was a mirror, its frame carefully ornamented, and shapes like dragons chased each other around its edges.
“Look, boy: a gift for you, if you let me embrace you.”
The mirror’s face was turned to me and, for an instant, I saw my own face reflected in its surface. For that single, fleeting moment, I was not alone in the mirror’s bright reaches. Other faces crowded around mine, tiny faces-tens, hundreds, thousands of them, a whole legion of the lost. Small fists beat at the glass, as if hoping to break through to the other side. And among them, its eyes huge with terror, I saw my own face, and I knew that this was how it could be.
“Please, leave me alone.”
I was trying not to cry, but my cheeks burned and my sight grew misty. The thing hissed, and for the first time I became conscious of the smell, a dense, loamy stench of rotting leaves and still, dank water. A lighter, less foul odor drifted in and out of my senses, curling through the stink of decay like a snake through the undergrowth.
It was the scent of alder.
The stick hand gestured again, and this time a puppet danced at the ends of its fingers: a small infant, carefully carved, so lifelike that it looked like a tiny person, a homunculus, silhouetted against the moonlight. It jerked and danced as the fingers moved, yet I could see no strings controlling its limbs and, when I looked closer, I could discern no joins at its elbows or legs. The creature’s arm extended, moving the puppet closer to me, and I could not help but give a little moan of fear when the true dimensions of the marionette became clear.