The Woods: Part One

by Milo Abrams

front of it. "Wait," he stopped, "the truck!" James sprinted across the kitchen and burst through the heavy front door, jumping clear off the porch, skipping every step and ran to the truck. Still sitting on the seat were the binoculars. He grabbed them and put them to his eyes but all he saw was the house. “Argh, damn house,” he grunted as he made his way toward the back. Clearing the distance between the truck and the front of the barn in seconds, he inhaled deeply, trying to catch his breath while he scanned the backyard through the binoculars. It was gone.

  "Damn.”

  He spent the rest of the day wondering about what he had seen. Losing his interest to help his dad work on the car, he spent the afternoon sporadically checking the kitchen window and lying around. At one point, his dad came back inside pouring with sweat and grease. “I filled your deer feeder with the feed. I saw you forgot to do that.”

  “Oh,” James replied, “thanks. I guess I just forgot.”

  “It's okay,” he said wiping grease from his hands on a rag. “Oh, and I also noticed last night that you discovered my laptop. You're not in trouble and I'm sure this must be quite an adjustment for you. Just don't delete anything," Nolan said as he walked to the table then brought the computer back with him and set it down in front of James. "Please don't spend all your time on here. I wasn't going to tell you I had internet access, you know, to help you really have an authentic country experience."

  "Don't worry, Dad, I know how to handle a computer. And I promise I won't. I’m just going to look for ways to improve the deer feeder." This made his father smile. He tried to affectionately mess up James’s hair but James ducked out of the way of his grease-blackened hand laughing.

  James didn't want to upset his father. He knew that he could blow his chance of being able to use the computer again for the rest of the summer. After looking at pictures of deer feeders he concluded that the idea was pretty simple and anything more elaborate would require more money and he wasn't about to ask his dad. He already couldn't muster the courage to tell him he thought there was a strange animal in the backyard. The idea of a wolf had already unscientifically been disproven, so he searched for animals that might resemble what he had been seeing, but nothing fit. Even looking at pictures of coyotes and wolves didn't seem right. The shape of the body and how it stood up and walked back into the woods wasn't the same. He needed more evidence. He needed to see the creature in the woods again because now all his daydreams of deer and wolves abandoned him. There was something in the woods behind his father's house and it was watching him.

  Even that night James’s mind wouldn't let go of the woods and its secret. The darkness of his room was replaced by the low light conditions of the woods as he slipped from the waking world to a place where he would be thrown face to face with the gritty truth of his fears through his dreams.

  James sat in the dirt, with trees twisted around him like a prison. The sound of shuffling leaves startled him and before he could form a conscious thought he was flying through the trees, his feet pounding the ground with the beat of his heart. Ahead of him, a huge boulder worn with deep grooves and pockets where water had eroded its surface sat firmly planted in the ground completely out of place in the dark green of the trees. He ran up to the rock, placed his hands on its slippery surface and instinctively tried to climb up it, but it was too tall and too smooth. Behind him the trees whispered and shuddered with the vibrations of something moving deep within them. James scampered around to the other side, pressing his back up against its solid and reassuring presence.

  “Help!” he called out in vain.

  Suddenly the large stone against his back shivered. He turned and backed away from it, watching as its round and stable shape began to melt and become fluid. He watched in horror as the bulbous boulder became thin and distorted as it rearranged to take on a new shape. Four long slender legs began to appear, gripping the ground with pointed claws. The backside stretched and twisted into a tail, and the top arched down toward a growing head that grew several rows of protruding teeth. James backed up, tripping over a root, then scrambled backwards as he watched the boulder transform into a wolf.

  “No!” he screamed, picking himself up to run.

  The trees whipped his body as he ran and he could hear the crunching and crashing of the wolf behind him. He finally came to an opening in the trees that led him to the edge of a cliff. The wind blew hard, making him shiver. Below him was a river and behind him growls rumbled through the trees. As soon as he heard a tree behind him snap from the wolf’s weight, he jumped.

  Day Three

  7

  Dreams are complicated things. Some people remember dreams they had the night before every morning, while others may only remember two over the course of an entire month. But everyone dreams and everyone has nightmares. James was one those people who hardly remembered his dreams. His nights were usually blank blinks of being like going through a wormhole from one day to the next. It took a lot for James to remember a dream.

  He woke up in the morning of the third day covered in sweat and shivering. The box fan in the corner continued to hum along but it wasn't blowing on him, he had it on just for noise. James still found it hard to completely adjust to sleeping in the silence without the noise of the city, so his dad gave him an old box fan he kept in the barn to use at night. It was dirty and covered with splotches of paint, but it did the trick. James wiped the sweat from his forehead and stepped out of bed like he had landmines attached to his feet. His dad's new house had central air, a luxury he never knew back in the city.

  Stepping out from the hallway, he expected to see his dad in the kitchen making breakfast. He was torn between wanting to tell his dad all about the dream he had and wanting to forget about it completely. To his surprise, his dad was nowhere to be found in the house. No sizzling skillet, no bubbling coffee pot, and no breakfast. He grabbed a colorful afghan draped over the back of the couch and wrapped it around himself. The hardwood floors felt like an ice rink to his naked feet as he walked to the kitchen window and looked out to the field anxiously. Outside, the dead grass stretched under the morning sun, begging for rain, all the way to the dark wall of trees at the back of the property. He scanned the tree line for his creature but the only thing he saw was the deer feeder.

  Nolan opened the door, drenched in sweat and covered in grease and grime. He pulled a red rag from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped his face, took one look at James wrapped in the afghan and hunched over like a wet puppy in a snow storm then burst into laughter.

  "What's so funny?" James asked scowling.

  "Look at you," Nolan said heading for the sink to wash his hands, "you look pathetic. Poor kid, was the air too low for you?"

  James tried to act tough but he was too cold. He hadn't just woken up with sweaty hair, his shirt and pants also felt wet. For a minute he thought he might have pissed himself but thankfully his full bladder led him to believe otherwise. Instead, he was drenched in an anxious, fearful, nervous sweat. There was something in the woods behind the house and he was the only one seeing it. Not only that, but it was now in his dreams, too. "No, it was good. I think I just woke up hot and sweaty is all."

  "You eat yet?" Nolan asked.

  "No."

  "Well, let's get some breakfast in you, then you could help me work on the car." Nolan smiled as he began heating a skillet. He pulled a box of pancake mix from the cupboard and poured it into a mixing bowl.

  James emptied his aching bladder then changed out of his pajamas and into something dry. He wondered if telling his dad about his dream and the creature in the woods was a good idea. He wasn't even sure his dad would believe him. Nolan was a man of medicine and science and his logical approach to the world had slipped into the inner workings of James's brain without him realizing it. As strange as everything had been over the last couple days, James still had a hard time believing that there was a creature in the woods behind his dad's house.

  He reappeared into the kitchen and was greeted w
ith a mountain of pancakes. "Wow, Dad, these look great!"

  Nolan laughed, the creases of his aging cheeks gently lifting a smudge of grease below his eye similar to a football player. "It's instant!"

  They sat quietly at the table and James watched as his dad ate, unaware of everything that was going through his mind. He couldn't tell his dad that he had a bad dream and woke up scared. His dad saw him as a growing man now, at least that's what he had told him. Although his internal struggle drifted from side to side like a ship on stormy seas, he ultimately couldn't find the courage to tell his dad about his dream.

  "Not bad," Nolan said, burping loudly. "So, you want to help with the car? You left me hanging out there yesterday."

  "Sure," James said. "I'll be out in a minute."

  Since James never remembered dreaming, it felt like a historic time for him, and he decided to grab some paper and jot it down. He remembered something his history teacher once told him. He said, "The reason we write things down is not so we don't forget them, but so we remember how important they really were." To James it sounded kind of sappy but he was impressionable to those sorts of things. As the minutes passed, the strength of his nightmare weakened. It seemed the more he tried to recall every detail, the more