The Wendygo House

by Jon Jacks

  For her granny, naturally.

  ‘Oh what big eyes you’ve got…’

  She isn’t exactly acting like a girl walking through a wood plagued by a flesh eating wolf. Then again, in the story, she doesn’t realise there is a wolf hanging around her granny’s home, does she?

  At least, not until it’s too late to do anything about it.

  Is that why I’m here? Am I supposed to warn her?

  ‘Don’t go into your granny’s house...’

  Am I a sort of feminine replacement of the woodman who saves her in the story?

  Or am I just to stay way clear of everything, and let the story pan out as it should?

  ‘Wait, wait!’ I cry out, running as fast as I can now through the whipping stems. ‘You’re in danger…!’

  *

  The little girl hasn’t heard me.

  She’s still gaily skipping down the path ahead of me.

  Heading towards, I can see now, as I break out of the undergrowth onto the path stretching behind her, a small house lying even deeper within the forest.

  A small, yellow house. A small wendy house.

  The little girl is still singing: perhaps that’s why she hasn’t heard me.

  ‘…The line broke, the monkey got choked, and they all went to heaven in a little row boat…’

  I run after her, yelling out a warning once more.

  ‘Please wait! It might be dangerous going in there!’

  Drawing up close behind her, I stretch out a hand. I touch her gently on the shoulder to make her aware of my presence.

  She spins around, looks up at me from beneath her hood with a garish, extended grin.

  She’s had her face painted: yet the effect is terrible.

  It’s like Batman’s Joker, with a ridiculously wide, completely askew mouth. Like the poor girl’s facepainter’s stopped taking her happy pills way too soon.

  ‘Hello!’ the girl trills excitedly. ‘Do you think I’m pretty?’

  Her free hand is moving towards her basket.

  There’s not just bread and flowers in there after all. There’s also an exceptionally large pair of scissors. They glint in the light of what little of the sun’s rays manage to penetrate this far through the veiling trees.

  ‘Er, well…yes, of course,’ I answer unsurely.

  It’s an answer that appears to placate her: instead of continuing to reach for the handle of the scissors, she instead raises her hand towards her face.

  She scrubs hard at her face with her hand, removing most of the face paint.

  Even clear of the paint, however, her mouth is horrifically malformed.

  Her face has been badly slashed from ear to ear.

  ‘How about now?’ the little girl asks with her terrible grin.

  *

  Chapter 12

  The little girl’s paint covered hand once again begins to reach towards the scissors glinting in her basket.

  I slightly look away, quickly working out my chances of being able to run away.

  As if by magic, the evilly grinning girl appears directly in front of me once more.

  I turn to run off another way – only for her to swiftly change position yet again, blocking my way.

  It’s impossible to run away from her. She seems to simply reappear in front of me no matter which way I turn.

  ‘You still haven’t answered,’ she light-heartedly admonishes me.

  She’s now wielding the brightly sparkling scissors. Waving them in front of my face.

  ‘Am I pretty?’ she asks again, her voice pleading, desperate.

  ‘Yes, of course you’re –’

  She slashes out with the scissors, aiming for my mouth. Aiming to give me a mouth like hers.

  To make me pretty, like her.

  I swing my head back just in time to avoid the worst of the slashing scissors, raising my arms at the same time to protect my face.

  My studded leather jacket takes the worst of the blow. Despite this, the sharp blades catch me along one cheek. They draw blood, gashing my skin badly.

  The girl chuckles elatedly, perhaps thinking she’s caused more damage than she has.

  Throwing her bloodied scissors back amongst the bread in her basket, she whirls around. She sprints off into the forest as if the tangled stems are incapable of restraining her.

  She’s singing happily once more.

  ‘…My sister told her, I kissed a soldier…now she won't buy me, a rubber dolly…’

  *

  The sun-like flashes of the little girl’s red cloak gradually vanish into the darkness of the surrounding forest.

  The red stain on my hand, however, simply increases the more I try and wipe away the blood pouring from the gash to my face.

  I might have escaped the worst of the girl’s vicious slash to my face, but I’m still cut badly, and bloodied.

  I could do with a better way of stemming the flow of blood, cleaning my wound.

  I glance up the winding path towards the silently waiting wendy house.

  Is that a way out of this dreadful place?

  Does it connect me somehow with the wendy house in our own back yard?

  Does it lead me back home?

  Or is it really the home of Little Red Riding Hood’s granny?

  Maybe even the lair of the wolf?

  I don’t care. I need help to stop this bleeding, to treat this gash to my face.

  I start heading towards the patiently waiting yellow house.

  *

  Chapter 13

  ‘Hello?’

  I say it as I open up the door.

  Crazy, huh?

  I’m really expecting granny to be laid out in her bed in here. With big teeth. Perfect for gobbling me up, naturally.

  But there’s no bed in here. Not even the doll’s bed I’d seen in Pearl’s version of this little wendy house.

  Yet bar the lack of the doll lying in her bed, this little wendy house looks exactly like Sis’s. All dark and gloomy. All remarkably tiny.

  At the back, it’s darker still. Once again, just like it is in Pearl’s little house.

  Does that mean that this little house has a door hidden there? Just as there is in Pearl’s?

  I step closer; yep, the door’s there right enough.

  It opens easily. It seems dark on the other side of the door too.

  Another corridor, perhaps?

  I step through the doorway.

  No wonder its dark here.

  It’s not a corridor.

  I’ve come out of the other side of the wendy house.

  And I’m looking directly into the thick, dark forest that runs around the back of our yard.

  *

  I’m home!

  Minus Pearl, of course. And the other girls.

  But now I can get Dad’s help. And the help of anyone else who’s prepared to believe my tale of the white rabbit and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: all lying beneath our back yard.

  Yeah; it shouldn’t take much effort persuading anyone about any of that.

  I spin around – and my jaw drops.

  The wendy house has gone.

  Instead, I’m looking out over a pebbled beach.

  And, beyond it, the seemingly endless stretch of one of the Great Lakes.

  *

  Chapter 14

  Just before I break down in tears of frustration, I recognise where I am.

  It’s the coast, not far from where we live.

  Correction: where we used to live. Used to live with Mom.

  I remember the general rise and fall of the projecting, rocky spars curving out around our bay. When you’re brought up in such beautifully inspiring scenery, you don’t forget it easily.

  I glance behind me once more.

  But no; sadly, I’m not almost home.

  The forest is still there, almost reaching right up to the beach itself. As it must have done hundreds of years before. Before the settlers arrived here.

  There a
ren’t any houses. No streets. No stores.

  So, maybe I’m almost home, bar a few hundred years.

  Great.

  Just great.

  Being a hundred miles out would be an easier problem to surmount.

  Glancing back along the run of the beach, I see that there’s something else that differs from my own memory of the coast: large dark shapes, strewn across a large area of the pebbles. They could be the bared and broken skeletons of whales, beached on the edge of the lapping waters.

  With nowhere better to head to, I head towards them.

  The closer I get, the more I realise I was mistaken to take them as beached, rotting whales. They’re structures of wood. Boats that have been dragged ashore. Boats stripped of their planks and beams. Cannibalised.

  Like a scene – if I recall it correctly – from our history lessons at school. Those earlier, unsuccessful would-be settlers, who had to make their homes from the wood of the boats they’d arrived in.

  I can understand the problems they’d have attempting to cut these trees with the relatively primitive equipment they would have brought with them.

  Dad had gone through god knows how many of his electric saw blades when he’d cut up a few of the smaller trees to make the wendy house.

  It was like, he’d joked, the wood didn’t want to give up its right to life easily.

  He would have given up, I’m sure. Even the old, more resourceful Dad I once knew would have given up: he’d have bought a trunk from a sawmill, or ready cut planks.

  But he’d elevated the building of the wendy house into a final challenge. One that, this time, wasn’t going to bring him back down to earth with a crash, showing him, yet again, what a pathetic failure he was.

  He’d struggled on, furiously discarding what remained of his power tools as they packed up one by one.

  He wouldn’t need them anymore, anyhow. His business was finished.

  He’d finish this damn wendy house, no matter what it took out of him.

  Well, sorry Dad: but it looks to me like that damn wendy house still hasn’t finished taking payment for the wood you took to build it.

  *

  Chapter 15

  ‘Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line…’

  What?

  Not that song again!

  But wait – what am I saying?

  Could that be Pearl? And the girls?

  It’s not one girl singing! It’s a group of them.

  The singing is coming from the hollows, the dips and recesses lying amongst the grass strewn dunes that stretch out landward from this part of the beach.

  I run up the beach, slowing and struggling a little in the thick sand that’s blown against the slightly rising land. I grab at the long, spiky grass as I near the mound’s peak, using it to help pull me up to the top.

  Down in the hollow, I see what’s become of the boats. The wood has been transformed into crude homes, low-roofed and small, sheltering from the cold winds behind the dune’s grass-topped hillocks. It’s like a tiny village, made quickly and in desperation rather than with any sense of beauty or pleasantness in mind.

  It’s a village that appears to be empty, apart from what seems to be the endless chanting of that damn skipping song.

  ‘…My mama told me, if I was goody,…that she would buy me, a rubber dolly…’

  Running past a number of apparently empty huts, and surmounting two more rises, I find myself looking down on a small group of skipping, singing girls.

  Unfortunately, it’s not Pearl and her friends. These girls are darkly, shabbily dressed. It’s an old type of dress too, with what were probably once voluminous skirts.

  The girls themselves are pale and skinny. No; not just skinny – withered. Their eyes are darkly set, like they’ve had nowhere near enough food.

  Way off to one side of the skipping girls, there’s a hut from which other singing emanates: hymns. It must be what passes for a church here, where the adults have gathered.

  It can’t be a Sunday, otherwise the girls would be in there with them. Singing their praises to God, celebrating the cycles of the seasons, of life.

  As one of the girls casually glances up from her steady twirling of the long rope, she sees me.

  Her slight smile falls from her face. Her already bulbous eyes open wider.

  Others, noting her look of horror, follow her gaze to also look my way.

  Like her, their faces contort in terror.

  The skipping stops, the rope spilling lazily to the floor. The song fades out.

  What’s wrong with them?

  Do I really looks so bad? So different?

  And then I taste the blood in my mouth. The blood running from my slashed cheek.

  I must look like some rabid vampire who’s been overdosing on virgin flesh.

  I quickly bring up a hand to wipe the blood away: and as one, all the girls scream in fright, then turn and run off towards the surrounding woods.

  *

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ I yell as I rush after them. ‘I don’t mean any harm!’

  And sure; wiping the blood away from my mouth was just the perfect way to reassure them I wasn’t about to devour them all whole, wasn’t it?

  As everywhere else around here, the wood brings any further extension of the dunes to a sudden halt, like a solid black wall preventing anything progressing beyond it.

  Despite this, the terrified girls manage to effortlessly weave through the tightly packed trees. As I hurriedly follow on after them, I see how this has been made possible: the settlers might have found themselves incapable of sawing into the iron-like trunks (here and there I can spot the shallow gashes, the only results of their fruitless attempts), but they’ve cleared away pathways as they’ve removed the more easily hacked branches.

  With her bright red cloak, Little Red Riding Hood had been relatively easy to spot amongst the gloom. The girls, in their spartanly dark clothes, are another matter.

  They flow through the forest like spectres, visible only through their rushed movement. Their screams.

  ‘Please wait! I just want to talk…!’

  It’s pointless me shouting after them. They can’t hear. They don’t want to hear.

  They don’t trust me.

  They just want to get as far away from me as they can. As fast as they can.

  Despite the cleared pathways, enough branches and stems remain to claw at me violently as I pursue the fleeing girls. The branches must be similarly lashing at the running girls, yet not one girl seems to care, their dire need to get away from me obviously deemed more important.

  Strangely, those already deeper within the forest, those farthest from me, suddenly burst into a louder cacophony of shrieks and terrified yells. There’s also a louder crashing and snapping of branches, the sounds of a careless, hurried onrush through the woods.

  The horrified screams flood back towards me, gathering in strength as each girl picks up and repeats the shrieks in a flowing wave of growing terror. With each fresh cry, each girl abruptly changes the direction of her flight, their wraith-like shadows and shapes now urgently rushing off to one side. They crash through the tightly packed trees with absolutely no consideration for any hurt or damage they’re sustaining.

  No matter the noise they’re making in their headlong rush through the woods, it’s as nothing to the thunderous crash of thicker branches being brutally smashed and cast aside by the girls’ new pursuers.

  There are loud snarls, grunts, growls.

  Amongst the rapidly shattering dark wickerwork of the forest, there are flashes of swiftly moving ash-grey fur, of creatures immense in size, and remarkable in their power.

  They run on two legs, their arms long and grotesquely muscled, their muzzles extended, and full of sharp, already bloodied teeth.

  They could have been werewolves.

  But they look like something even worse.

  *

  Chapter 16
r />   Unlike any animal, the beasts pursuing the fleeing girls possess a dexterity any man would envy.

  They twirl and fling heavily weighted bolas towards the fleeing girls, bringing them down already securely bound around the legs. The girls topple, thrash around, vanish with a terrified squeal into the veiling undergrowth.

  The creatures pounce on their captured prey, binding the poor girls’ wrists with more rope, any squealing cut short with tightly wound scarves. The wolf-like beasts then hurriedly bundle their quivering, struggling catches into sacks, throwing the filled sacks over shoulders, two to a beast.

  Each loaded creature then happily lopes off through the woods, seemingly heading back towards the makeshift village.

  With the cracking of whipped air, a bola is suddenly whirling its way towards me. I ty to turn and run – too late.

  The weighted ropes curl around my legs, locking them firmly together. Bringing me down.

  The beasts leap upon me, binding my arms behind my back in one swift move.

  Then comes the scarf around my mouth. The sack over my head.

  *

  Even blinded by the sacking, I realise we’re moving with remarkable speed and ease through the woods.

  I’m dizzy with fear, with a shortness of breath. Slung over the beast’s shoulder, face down, every movement knocks the wind from my stomach. The muffling scarf makes it hard to breath.

  Unfortunately, despite its tightness, the scarf doesn’t block out the stench.

  Urine. Rotting meat. Cemeteries.

  At last we begin to slow, to even take care as we move quietly through the undergrowth.

  ‘Careful Henry!’ a female voice hisses.

  Henry?

  What sort of name is that for a man-eating beast?

  We stop, the beast’s breathing heavy, even a little laboured. I get the feeling that he’s crouching, maybe even hiding.

  ‘It’s clear!’

  The female voice again, more urgent this time. Even quieter than before, too, but that’s because she’s now somewhere ahead of us.

  The beast rises to his feet, breaking into a spurt of remarkable speed. I bounce painfully on his shoulder.

  Next, we’re abruptly rising, perhaps up a small hillock. My hanging, covered head passes through the many blunted strikes of what I presume is thick, tall grass. Then we’re almost tumbling down the other side of the mound, the running of the beast strangely hurried and careering.