Into the Woods (second draft)
My feet stand at the edge. One more step and I would be, well….in it's neck of the woods. I would be there for the taking – a shrimp in a piranha pond. Dammit, I hate these woods - the nightmares they've given me; these trees and the twigs that stick out from them like arms trying to grab at anyone who wanders too close, the eerier silence that comes from hearing a twig snap in the distance, is someone there? The faces of the missing children come to mind when I stare blanky at the fog that moves quietly through the grass and rises up through the trees.
Their faces on the missing persons posters, the desperate pleas and cries from distraught parents over the radio and on TV. These woods are death.
The first time it happened, it was some kid on the other side of town…Alex I think his name was. There were a couple of appeals over the radio, but I never saw his face on the TV or the back of my morning milk. Maybe his Mum couldn’t afford to search for him that way, she did work as a waitress afterall, but I heard she got fired for screaming at a kid who joked to her about Alex being in the burgers. She was definitely a suspect for a while, rumour was that she despised her son for driving his Father away, but eventually…people just sort of moved on and let it pass.
It wasn’t until a police car parked on patrol, looking out for speeding drivers across from the woods noticed a big heap of something across the road, just outside the woods and hidden in the tall weeds that mark its entrance. The news broadcaster on the radio said the crime scene was compromised from the policeman puking his guts out when he discovered Alex’s body. His entire lower jaw had been ripped clean off and there was lots of funny looking writing carved into his ten-year-old flesh. When the news got out about the kid being cut up with all them symbols on him, that’s when the rumours of Witchcraft started. No-one took the rumours seriously though, well, at first.
Not until little Sydney Brown, from just down the street, went riding her bike with her younger sister, Jacky, one day. Only Jacky, 4 at the time, found her way home that night. Jacky could barely talk before the incident, but after it happened she went completely mute – and her blonde hair took a whiter appearance. Sydney was all over the news, recorded pleas from her parents looking for any information, for any leads, witnesses…anything about their daughter. No-one wanted to say it, but with Alex’s body being discovered only four months prior to Sydney going missing, the image of his body when it was found couldn’t help but come to mind whenever her name was mentioned.
And then it happened. It was late one night when a search party for Sydney, made up of parents and teachers and police, were just about to call it a night from searching the woods. One of the members told the press that he thought he felt a few rain drops, but when he looked up he was standing under six-year-old Sydney’s body. Sydney’s body was hanging from a branch 15’ above the search party – her bottom jaw was missing and she was hanging from that branch from her orange ringlets tied around the branch in lots of little knots.
The entire neighbourhood went into a panic after that. A curfew was set for all kids under Sixteen and parents volunteered to run kids home after classes ended for the day. The woods were taped off, with the yellow police tape wrapped around tree to tree - to keep people out of the crime scene, they said. But it felt more like they were trying to keep more kids from wandering into the woods and not coming back. Or to try and keep whatever was rumoured to be in the woods, in. The local sheriff even spoke at a conference about the murders - I had been watching the TV with my parents whilst my younger brother was playing some game on his iPad.
He looked up at me, his sweet, blue eyes looking at me, blinking from the hair in his eyes. "You know it's a Witch that's doing all these killings?"
"Oh yeah? where'd you hear that?" I had asked, jokingly.
"Elliott in my class said he hard his Mommy on the phone to Sydney Brown's Mommy and that Sydney Brown's Mommy had told his Mommy that Jackie had been drawing lots of pictures of a Witch"
I had laughed a little, looking over at my parents. My Mum's eyes were wide with concern and my Dad was leaning over, trying to listen to the police conference.
"Jackie is four and her sister has just had a terrible thing happen to her. You are a big boy, brody, and big bodys aren't meant to believe in witches and monsters and stuff like that"
Drawing in a deep breath, Brody had stuck his tongue out and blew wet raspberries all over me, "it's a witch and that's that".
"Brody, enough" said Dad and we all went back to listening to the TV.
m,;
I was in class when I found out. The news spread around like wildfire throughout my entire school, each pupil blowing in the breeze whispering it to their science partner or overhearing it in the corridor and the flame would light up and grow farther.
That night, there was another police conference, though very brief, urging everyone in the neighbourhood and surrounding areas to pay their respects at a candlelit remembrance ceremony for Jackie Brown -
My brother looked up at me from the TV screen, "it was the witch that made her do it"
Jackie was found the day before impaled on a gate below the second story window of their house - some say she jumped, some say she was hypnotised by the witch of the woods. That once you lay eyes on her, as Jackie must have from her drawings, she had full power over you for the rest of your life.
The police couldn't explain why the four year old had jumped to her death, and they didn't mention whether or not it could be a direct result of her sister's death - it was her parents who spoke out about the drawings. Maybe they had been influenced by the rumours she had heard before she jumped, but knowing that these pictures of a witch and a young, dead girl who looked like Syndey Brown were drawn moments before Jackie Brown died, was haunting enough for everyone to consider the possibility that something
someone
...a witch?
was out there, in the woods....waiting for her next victim to walk too close to the trees, to venture too far out of earshot to not be heard screaming as their flesh tore and their jaws ripped.
The police did nothing. How could they? there was no evidence of anyone else being at the crime scenes other than the children themselves. All they could do was enforce a curfew outwith school hours - and that didn't even stop some from going missing.
It happened last weekend. Brody just didn't come home from school, immediatly the rumours began that wouldn't be coming home, that he would be found like the others; mutilated, his corpse unrecognisable from his living self.
I wasn't going to let that happen, not to my brother.
My feet stand at the edge of these woods. I don't think whatever's in there will touch me, it seems to prefer younger victims...or maybe that's just my wishful thinking. Nevertheless, I'm going in. My feet stand at the edge and I cross the line into the thicker, fuller blades of grass. I'm going into the woods.
