The Forest People

The Forest People

It was pouring rain, the afternoon sky dark with greenish clouds as I rounded a curve on Benner Road. No radio reception up here – only static sputtered from the dashboard speaker, punctuated by the AM crackling sounds of lightning. The Jeep’s wipers were set on high, but their frantic movements did little to clear my view.

The wind intensified, and occasional bursts of hail jolted the Jeep with clatter. Twice, I nearly drove into the trees as I lost my way through a blur of rain. I was driving into the worst of the storm, where the greenish gray thunderheads darkened to a black green color, like some dark abyss preparing to swallow me whole.

One of my headlights winked out. I rounded another bend, and then it happened. Everything flashed blinding white, and a bone-rattling concussion consumed everything.

When I came to my senses, I was off on the right shoulder, the Jeep tilted at a twenty degree angle, its right wheels mired deep in the muck near the trees. My engine was dead, the wipers frozen mid-wipe on the windshield. A large scorch mark smoldered at the center of the hood, from where lightning had struck. The Jeep's metal frame had saved my life, but I knew the vehicle's innards were ruined. I caught a faint whiff of burning wire insulation – the electronics were fried.

With nightfall approaching in a few hours, I had to seek help. I unfolded the map that Old Silas, the local gas station owner, had given me when I’d first moved here. I found my current location, the southern edge of a forest he'd labeled "KEEP OUT!" in red pencil.

I remembered him pointing out various landmarks of the region. He was the expert, having lived in these parts all his life. I recalled a moment from last year, when his finger tapped the red-penciled patch on the map.

“Stay outta here,” he’d warned, his tone serious, his jovial face suddenly as solid and featureless as stone. “There’s bad things in them woods. They make you see things.”

Old wives tales aside, I saw his gas station was about four miles away, through and beyond a mile of this “forbidden forest” and down a mountain slope. I swore at myself for not having a raincoat as I dug the flashlight from the glove box. Then I plunged into the storm.

I jumped across a ditch full of mud along the tree line, then stepped between the trunks of tightly grouped conifers. It was dark as night in here, so I switched on the flashlight and swept the beam around. The rain in here was a slow, heavy drip. My glasses fogged up in the humidity, so I removed them. My vision blurred a little, but at least the fog was gone.

Thunder boomed as I followed a northerly path deeper into the woods. I nearly lost my footing when I stumbled over some tree roots, but my right hand caught on a slick, oily evergreen trunk. I smelled something terrible, like a powerful mildew stink. I looked to the tree trunk, where my hand had broken through a strange formation of tree fungus, freeing a cloud of yellow spores that now floated around me. On my next breath, the strange spores made me choke and gag, so I fell back from the tree and smacked my hands together to remove as many of them as possible.

As I picked my way further among the trees, I began to feel lightheaded, and the green of the pine needles began to shimmer with an intense vividness. Soon, they seemed almost luminous. I continued on, the air thick with the smell of rotting leaves and wood, and I narrowly dodged a number of large orb webs strung between the branches. Enormous black and gold spiders at their centers seemed to give off their own eerie glow.

Further on, I saw flashes of lightning between the trees, as though a clearing lay ahead. When I emerged from the pine forest, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Before me stood a forest of garishly twisted deciduous trees, all of them bare of leaves, their gnarled barks glistening in the rain. They continued on as far as the eye could see. This was mid-July – were all these trees dead? The sky was growing darker again, and more frequent blazes of lightning lit the macabre scene around me with a hot blue-white light.

In the next flash, I saw a man standing in silhouette against the white-hot air. As thunder rolled off, I hurried forward to tell him about my accident. Indeed, a line of footprints, sunk into mud and rotting leaves, led me straight toward him. As I drew closer, I realized he was turned away from me. He wore a baggy, torn shirt that hung loosely over his bony frame. His right forearm looked rough-textured, with spiny fingers that appeared twice too long to be human. Rain poured off his tattered, wide-brimmed hat.

Mist boiled up around me, as if the rotting earth were converting the rain into fog. As it rose and enveloped me, I was pouring with sweat, so I opened my mouth to catch some raindrops and cool myself. I was soaked through to the skin, and the atmosphere here was stifling.

Within a few feet of him, I called out between the booms of thunder. He showed no reaction, so I reached out and tapped him on the left shoulder – because that arm looked more… human… than the other.

He whipped around, his face ablaze in a flash of lightning. His flesh looked like a moving, morphing mass of mud. I backed away, a scream in my throat, and watched on, transfixed, as the dough-like mass quickly took shape – grooves appearing and deepening, the nose rising outward as a kind of projection, the eyes appearing first like small mud spheres that quickly resolved into eyes with eyelids… At last their surfaces smoothed, and wet, glittering eyes regarded me with mischievous malevolence.

In the final fleeting seconds of our encounter, his face took on much finer, more recognizable features, and my gorge rose as I realized who he was, who he’d become. My father. My father who had died ten years ago and lay underground a thousand miles from here.

Then his face twisted, and a sickle grin appeared. I screamed in horror and fled. As I rushed between the trees and back toward the pine woods, sharp twigs tore at my arms and chest, but I had to get out of here. On and on I ran, eventually realizing that the pine forest I had traversed was gone, replaced instead by the same, twisted, leafless forest in all directions.

The rain gradually ended, but the rising puffs of fog grew ever more dense, and soon I couldn’t see more than fifty feet. Booms of thunder were now distant and muffled. The muffling fog filled my nostrils with a nauseating stink of rot and decay. Not the decay of wood and leaves, but of rotting flesh and bones…

Though the storm had abated, I couldn’t hear a single bird or insect – everything was still. All I heard was the trickle of rain off the branches of this unnatural forest of horrors. Having lost all sense of direction, I wandered aimlessly through the fog for what seemed like hours. I caught flickers of movement from the corners of my eyes – other people barely looming in the gray gloom. At one point, I found an unusually massive tree, perhaps a hundred feet tall, its branches kinked along their lengths in impossibly sharp angles. I rounded its thick, moss-slicked trunk, only to run into a girl, perhaps ten years old, wearing a tattered dress, both her arms formed from splayed, grooved branches like those of the trees about me.

She stared blankly at me before I tore away in a different direction. Wait… She looked familiar. So I turned back toward her, where she stood as if awaiting my return. Her eyes met mine, and her whole body began to shake. Then something tore through her chest, which now resembled old, musty fabric, not flesh, and a creature’s head poked through. It was made of tightly knotted wood, with eyes that didn’t move but were merely carved into the wood. Behind the head emerged shoulders, arms, and legs, and soon a small figure stood on the ground and stretched its twisted tree-branch limbs – the creature was perhaps two feet tall.

It regarded me curiously and then began walking toward me, just as two more wooden heads poked from the torn fabric of the now-motionless girl’s chest. The creatures made clicking sounds as they walked, and they communicated using basic arm movements. I shrank away in fright, having never seen beings of this sort.

The clicking sounds were now audible throughout the forest around me, and I watched more of these wooden creatures emerge from holes in tree trunks. Some of them climbed about the branches, while others dropped to the ground and also began stalking toward me.

I fled from them and eventually found my original path into this barren, dark forest. My footprints headed south, back toward my Jeep, so I reversed direction to follow the path I’d originally intended – due north, toward the nearest bit of human civilization on the map.

Things after that became hazy. On and on I ventured, as a veritable parade of the small wooden people now followed me. I passed enormous trees with hundreds of glowing, unblinking eyes on their trunks and branches, and small, mirror smooth ponds in which luminous fish swam.

I was exhausted, but I moved on to avoid the wooden people. God knows what they’d do to me – perhaps sacrifice me to one of the great eye-covered trees. At some point, evergreen trees appeared ahead of me. I charged into them, and the wooden people refused to follow further. Relieved, I began descending the wooded slope of a mountain. A half hour later, I stumbled from the brush, onto the shoulder of a winding, paved road. The fog was thin at this lower elevation, and, to my left, I saw the illuminated sign of Silas’ gas station. That’s when dizziness and exhaustion overtook me, and everything went black…

When I woke up, an old man was tending to me. I lay on a cot, and fluorescent lights hummed on the ceiling above.

“There he is!” the old man exclaimed with a smile, and I realized it was Silas. He gave me water to drink and offered up a couple bags of snack foods from beside the cash register out front.

Silas said a driver had found me lying unconscious beside the road and had brought me here. Silas had laid me down on the cot, about a half hour ago, in the back room of the gas station. Based on where I’d been walking, he knew I’d ventured into the strange forest he'd warned me about.

I described everything I’d experienced – from my Jeep getting struck by lightning, to the horrifying leafless forest and the otherworldly creatures that inhabited it. He listened without interruption or judgment. When I finished, he thought for a while and then spoke.

“I warned you about those woods. I told ya not to go in there. And just like I said, you saw things in there. What I call unnatural things. Who cares if they were real or not. That place bent your mind, twisted your thoughts, played games with yer head. I hope you'll stay outta there from now on.”

A chill ran down my spine as I recalled the tallest figure, morphing before my eyes into a demonic form of my deceased father. From that moment on, I knew I’d heed the old man’s advice and never venture into those woods again…