by Tobias Wade
The Trees
Have Eyes
Horror Stories From the Forest
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, businesses, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018
Haunted House Publishing
TobiasWade.Com
The Trees Have Eyes
Cover by: Taylor Tate
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The Trees Have Eyes
Contents
David Clark
Bill Owens III
H.G. Gravy
Isolation Cabin
Tobias Wade
World's Oldest Tree
JP Carver
Faces in the Woods
Crosses in the Field
I Remember Fireflies
Patrick McGrail
Tongue's Bondage
J.D. McGregor
California Dreaming
J. Speziale
Scarecrow
Project Erebus
Sister
Rain
Tara A. Devlin
Children of the Forest
What Lurks in Nightfall Forest
Forest of Dolls
Blair Daniels
Don't Stop on Route 33
The Wall in Grandpa’s Backyard
Patterns in the Bark
The Forest: A Video Game
Bottomless Pit
The Lights in the Woods
Blizzard Warning
How to Resurrect a Sister
Gemma Amor
The Little Man
Grant Hinton
Camp Credence
Outback Oblivion
Kyle Harrison
For Services Rendered
Uncle Howard's Canyon
The Treehouse
P. Oxford
Police Suspect Foul Play
Northern Lights
The Last Bus
Don't Follow the Fiddler
The Call
Jazzmin Moysey-Forrestall
The Siren and the Hound
Kelly Childress
The Sunset Doorway
Alanna Robertson-Webb
Something Creepy at Moss Glenn Falls
The Goatman of Lake Elmore
Candice Azalea Greene
Ahanu’s Story
AJ Horvath
Imagination
Dustin Chisam
The Devil’s Cauldron
Adrian J. Johnson
The Elevator in the Woods
Nick Botic
Don't Go Swimming in Long Lake
William Stuart
Seeker
Lucie and Snaggletooth
David Clark
Bill Owens III
My name is “Bill” Owens III, and in this journal I publish stories of those who’ve encountered supernatural, paranormal, bizarre and otherwise unexplainable phenomena, benevolent or malevolent or benign, and who feel they can’t turn anywhere else but need to be listened to. You may do with this information what you will.
***
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Robert Billings is rapping a light beat on the floor with his foot. It is a nervous tick, as he’ll explain, and throughout the course of this conversation, save for two occasions where he excuses himself briefly, that tick will cease only a single time. To calm himself he smokes too, and once he’s got his cigarette he lifts the pack and produces one for me; I decline. Then I set up the recording device and place that on the little table next to my chair, and turn it on.
”You know what’s a fact?” he says.
“What’s that?”
“Started smokin’ the same day the foot-jitter started.” He places the cigarette between his teeth and lights it after a failed attempt, puffs on it and coughs. “Ain’t that somethin’? Same damn day.”
“That have something to do with why I’m here?”
He nods a bit. “Ain’t no doubt about that.”
I write this down, and without looking up say, “So you were an outdoorsman, right?”
“Yessir. Never was one for cities. Closer I can get to nature the closer I am to God; why I chose to live out this way.” He nods up and over to the window. From there a rolling hill can be seen on which this house is built. At the bottom of its slope it is consumed by woods and surrounded, some miles off, by the eastern Appalachians (although those can hardly be seen from the living room). He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Started hiking when I was, what, seventeen? Eighteen, maybe? Late high school years, somewhere around then. Loved it too. Started climbing after that, and diving. Wish I could still get out there and do that stuff. But, y’know how it goes.”
“The march of time.”
He nods. “The march of time. Yessir.”
Throughout all of this I notice but do not mention the fact that his “foot-jitter” has subsided. Talk of nature calms him. The next topic will not.
“And in our phone call you said it was… caving, right? I remember you saying that was your ‘final frontier,’ is that right?”
The jitter resumes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
“A-yep. I was around twenty-seven, twenty-eight, realized I didn’t just like the outdoors for the sake of it. I liked the thrill, too, you know? Not danger, really, but, uh...” he trails off and swirls his hand in the air while he struggles to find the words
“The adrenaline rush.”
He snaps his fingers. “The adrenaline rush. Yes. The excitement. A little danger, I guess.” He laughs. I smile.
“So how experienced were you when it happened?”
“Intermediate. I’d been doin’ spelunking for a year or two at the time, give or take. Mostly in big, safe places, y’know—Carlsbad, Natural Bridge. Places folks go to a lot. Realized the uh, the novelty wore off after a while. It was fun, still, but—”
“…But not thrilling.”
“Bingo. Can’t be properly thrilling if it’s been done before. Way I see it, anyway.” He takes another drag that finishes his cigarette, and without hesitation produces, lights, and starts on a second. By the time our talk is concluded he’ll have finished what was left of the pack. “You thirsty?” he says. “Got some Billing’s Brew in the fridge.”
“You brew your own beer?”
“Keeps me busy.” He doesn’t wait for my response; he gets up with the cigarette between his teeth and moves into the kitchen, and a moment later he is back with two glasses filled with a thick stout. I take a sip, hold in a retch, and place it down. He downs a third of his glass in a single gulp. “Tryin’ to get the uh, the local farmer’s market to sell this stuff. But there’s all sorts of licensing shit I gotta work through.”
I steer the conversation back to the matter at hand. “So you said ‘it can’t be thrilling if it’s been done.’ So I’m guessing you started exploring caves that were… not as well known.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Few of ‘em were named. Most weren’t. Means I an’ whoever it was I was with got to name ‘em, which was a neat privilege. Usually just combined our names to make it easy. Billings-Adams. Billings-Baldwin-Francis-Pucker. Most of ‘em were small things, too. Little, one, two chamber holes in the mountainside. Tall enough to crouch in, maybe deep enough to lose sunlight, but not much bigger than that.” There is a pause before he a
dds, “But then there was Baldwin-Billings.” And his foot-jitter begins again, and with speed. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. When he takes another sip of his beer this causes him to spill a bit of it on his shirt. He dabs lazily at the stain; under his breath he mumbles, “Hell.”
“‘Baldwin-Billings,’” I say. “That one on a map?”
He shakes his head no. “An’ I hope it stays that way.”
“So how’d you find it?”
“My guide was a caving vet named John Baldwin. Met up with him on a previous hike and he tells me about this place he’d found all on his lonesome. Said he hadn’t had a chance to explore the place yet—at least not past the second chamber or so—and he invites me. An’ let me tell you this—a place that’s both unexplored and worth exploring? That’s a rare combination indeed. So I jumped at the chance. We get there, we park a good mile, mile an’ a half out, give or take, march up the mountain slope, an’ there it is. Just a little humble hole between two trees. Had to squeeze our way in.”
“No wonder it went under the radar.”
“For as long as it did, anyway. So in we go, an’ like most of the places I’d been in up to that point, it was real damn small. You know, we had to crouch in there, and for a minute I thought I got myself conned, or something. Like, ‘why the hell did he bring me here? There ain’t nothin’ special about this.’”
To avoid looking rude I force myself to swallow a third of my beer.
“That ready for prime time, you think?”
“What’s that?”
“The drink. You think I could sell it?”
“Uh, yeah! Yeah, it’s real good. Real strong.” After a pause I say, “So the cave was small?”
“Well, at first, yeah. But that’s when he turns on his flashlight and points over to the, uh, northern, northwestern side of the cave, roundabouts, an’ there’s a little gap there. Little cut in the rock that you could shimmy through. So he gets to work doin’ that, starts callin’ out stuff he sees, you know, ‘bend your knee around this rock, gotta duck a bit, twist your arm to get past this.’ Stuff like that. An’ before I get inside I’m thinkin’, hey, man, you know—I liked spelunking for the quiet, the adrenaline, the exploring. But I don’t like tight spaces. No, sir. If anything I like nature because it’s the opposite of tight spaces: wild, free air. Claustrophobia’s for high rises.”
“You’d never run into any tight caves?”
“Well, I had, but like I said—the ones that weren’t well mapped out, where I knew what I was gettin’ into, were so damn small, y’know, that even if there was a little squeezing required, or crawlin’ or something, you could usually see the other side. An’ usually that was it. But this—it was just blackness in there. Didn’t know how far back it all went.” He finishes his beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “But I’d already come that far, you know? So I suck it up, and I go in, an’ I’m workin’ real damn hard to not panic, you know—slow my breathing, trying to stay nice and relaxed. An’ he’s callin’ out obstacles an’ I’m doin’ what he says. Get through it just fine. Figure hell, I did that. Had to squeeze and duck and twist, but I got through. Can’t get much worse.”
“Might as well keep going at that point.”
He nods and finishes his second cigarette, and dumps its ashes in an overflowing tray. Then he lights his third. “Went on like that for a while. Place really was bigger than anywhere else I’d been that hadn’t been mapped out. Longer at least, not so much tall or wide. But it kept goin’ an’ goin.’ Started losin’ track of time. Lost track of how far in we were. When you’re workin’ that hard—an’ boy it is hard work, lemme tell ya—stuff like that just gets away from you.”
“So when did things start to go wrong?”
His foot-jitter picks up its pace again. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
“We found a pond. Eventually we get to a little precipice; overlooks a big drop-off. Over to the side of that is a small pond. Ain’t no life in it that I can see. Might not’ve even been deep enough to dive in. But I fill up my bottle at the pond before we start the descent, an’ I drink it. But then John yells at me not to; tries to wrestle it out of my hands, I’m confused an’ struggle back, and—and down he goes.”
“Into the pond?”
“Over the precipice.”
“God.”
“Yeah.” There’s a beat of silence while he collects his thoughts. Then he says, “Nasty fall, too. Big slab he was standin’ on weren’t as stable as it looked. It cracks, it slides, he goes down. Then I try to lean over to see if I can’t help him back up, and I go down too. Along with the rest of the rock.”
“How’d you survive?”
“Ain’t sure. I was pretty damn banged up; I’ll tell you that much.” He bites his cigarette, half-turns in his seat and lifts his shirt to reveal a jagged scar that runs nearly the full length of his right side.
“You see that?” he says. “Cracked three ribs, later found out. Had to wear one o’ them corset things for a few months. Felt like a real man in that.” He starts to chuckle.
But then I say, “What happened to John?”, and the laughter dies, and he lowers his shirt.
“Couldn’t find him.” He flicks ash in the tray. “Dunno how long I was out, but when I came to he was nowhere to be found. Had to dig out of the rubble myself. Called out for him, searched for him in the mess, you know—to see if he was buried. Nothing. Which meant he’d wandered off without me. So add bein’ real pissed off on top of every other damn thing.”
“Did you look for him?”
He shrugs. “At that point I didn’t give a damn what happened to the man. I just wanted to find a way out.” He begins a fresh cigarette—his fourth, by my count—and he says, “So I just wandered off into the cave. Didn’t know where I was goin.’ Didn’t know if there even was another exit, you know? But it’s not like there were any way out from where I was. So off I went. Walked for, God—I don’t know how long. Hours an’ hours, easily.”
“Can’t imagine you were equipped for that.”
“Had two granola bars. Ate those. Had a bit of trail mix. Ate that. Finished my water; never did find another pond to fill it in. Luckily the place opened up after that, though—tight corridors became hallways; little rooms you couldn’t stand in without bangin’ your head were now chambers, y’know, that you could hear your echo in. But I couldn’t find John for the life of me. At least not before things started gettin’ weird.”
“In what way?”
He relights his cigarette and gives me a smug side-look as he does it. Then he says, “Found writing.”
I blink. “You saw writing? Is that what you said?”
“Yessir.”
“In English?”
He shakes his head no. “Wasn’t any language I could identify, y’know, but it looked old. Ancient, even—almost like those, uh—Egyptian cuneiform things, like—”
“Hieroglyphs.”
“What?”
“Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs. Picture-words. Cuneiform was Sumerian.”
“Well, whatever it was, it was bizarre. Somehow—an’ this is gonna sound insane—I didn’t know what the writing said, like in a translatable way, but I got the gist of it. An’ I don’t know how. Don’t make any sense at all.”
“What was that gist?”
All at once he becomes visibly distressed. He fidgets, and adjusts himself in his seat. Then he says, “It wasn’t specific. Wasn’t like it was describin’ death an’ mayhem’ or anything. It was like… here. I’ll put it this way: you know when you’re a kid, an’ you’re afraid of the dark but you don’t know why? You see that uh, like an open closet at night, or look down in the basement from the top of the stairs, or somethin? You’re six, eight years old. What do you do?”
“You picture the boogeyman.”
“Right! Right, but why?”
I shrug. “I would imagine because the brain wants to put a face on what it doe
sn’t know. So it fills in the blank with possibilities that reflect your emotional state. Tries to justify the fear.”
“Good, good—now get rid of all that. You strip away the zombie, strip away the vampire, you know, the boogeyman—an’ what do you have? What’s left behind it all?”
“Naked, contextless, faceless dread. I guess.”
He snaps his fingers and leans back in his seat. “Exactly. Exactly. I didn’t read those words—hell, I didn’t even look at ‘em directly—but when I was runnin’ through the cave it was like they were just puttin’ exactly that shit in my brain somehow. Like it cut out the middle-man, y’know—took out the reading, took out me interpreting the words, took out the ideas behind the words. There are just words—coverin’ the floor, the walls, the ceiling, all of it—an’ then there’s that shit in my head. How’d you put it? Naked dread?”
I nod. “Like it… quantified death, or fear—and found a way to invoke that in you. Without you having to read it. That’s fascinating.”
“Fascinating to hear about, maybe. Bein’ there it’ll drive you mad, I’ll tell you what,” he says. “At that point it was less about escaping the cave, y’know, an’ more about escaping the words. It was torture, Bill. Truly, it was. Mental torture, psychological torture, spiritual—whatever you want to call it. I’d have much rather died alone—starved to death or suffocated in some godforsaken corner of that damn cave—than have to keep on enduring it. It was getting worse as I went, too.”
“How so, exactly?”
He pats out the ash. “Cave got darker as I went in. Don’t know how—ain’t like there’d been sunlight for as many hours or days as it’d been. But still; got darker an’ darker. Flashlight was less an’ less effective. I thought the batteries were dyin’ so I fumbled around an’ swapped ‘em out with my reserve pair. But it didn’t help. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, you know. That kind of dark. Gets right in there in your bones. It’s intimate. An’ the words—I don’t know. I got more an’ more aware of ‘em. An’ what they were puttin’ in here.” He taps his temple with his right hand. “Then other shit started happenin.’” He clears his throat and this rolls over into a whooping cough; he puts it out with a swig of beer. Then he says, “I started leavin’ the cave.”
