It Sees

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. James splashed water on his face and strained it through his graying beard. He felt haggard. He hadn’t been back to the forest in—

Well. He wasn’t a young man anymore.

The candlelight cast shadows on the wall that danced and flickered, reaching for him with spindly fingers. James shivered. He’d sworn to himself that he’d never come back here, but the dreams had been increasing in frequency the last few months.

The beast was taunting him.

Every dream he’d had over the decades corresponded with a missing persons case in the area and he’d tried; God he’d tried so hard to ignore it, but his conscience had finally gotten the best of him. He’d brought a shotgun even though he knew it was useless as anything other than a distraction. But if he could save just one of the teenagers in his dreams then maybe the yawning guilt that tore at his stomach would finally lessen.

Mitzi growled softly and he whirled around in a sudden panic, spilling the shells he’d been loading onto the floorboards. They cascaded and rolled with a sound not unlike raindrops or blood dripping as they glinted in the moonlight. He swung the gun around, panting as his eyes darted around feverishly but there was nothing there. The fireplace was dead, old wood stacked up like bones in a mausoleum. The cots were falling apart and a dusty wine bottle stared at him accusingly from the corner.

Thankfully, there was nothing on the ceiling but the dark brown stains that marked where Dorothy and Russell had died screaming 35 years ago. He followed Mitzi’s gaze to the window with mounting horror but there was nothing there. Perhaps his faithful hound could just sense it, lurking just out of sight in the foreboding darkness of the tree line.

Watching. Waiting.

“Don’t go scaring me like that old gal.” he muttered quietly, scratching her ears as knelt to collect his ammunition. The beast was intelligent, he knew that. It had stalked him and his friends relentlessly and learned to mimic their voices. Back then, Russell had theorized that it was a government experiment gone awry or aliens or something like that.

“You watch too many science fiction movies.” James heard his younger self say. And now, almost four decades later, he knew the truth. Some corners of the world were home to forgotten things. Ancient things with no name. Things that man was never meant to know existed.

Curiosity was a damnable quality of humanity.

James breathed deeply and headed for the door, his boots making the wood beneath them creak and that in turn making his heart race. And then he stepped out into the dark.

The forest around him was silent. It was wrong. Not a sound. Not even crickets. Mitzi had her ears flat against her head.

“It’ll be ok, girl.” He said and the words felt like a gunshot. A cold dread filled his chest and he knew that somehow he’d made a mistake. It knew he had entered its domain. He'd broken some kind of rule with his speech.

There was nothing that could be done. He walked into the tree line and gripped his gun tighter. He walked by instinct, by memory, turning left at the old oak tree and going deeper and deeper into the forest. Towards where the beast made its nest. Towards the place where they had woken it up. Something skittered along a tree branch and he whimpered, fumbling for his flashlight and clicking it on, readying his shotgun.

But it was just a raccoon. And a normal one at that. Untainted by the foul corruption of the beast. It had eyes, and when it hissed it had the right number of teeth. James sighed in relief and took a step forward, tripping on something stiff and landing on it with a grunt.

A moment later he recoiled in fear and panic when he realized it was staring at him.

It was a corpse, face frozen in a rictus howl of anguished fear. Dark empty sockets where its eyes should have been and— James felt the bile rising in his stomach. The flashlight illuminated the silvery glint of a spider web in the cavern that was the dead man’s missing throat. The spiders in the corpse scattered in the beam, and James almost threw up at the thought that the corpse was being slowly hollowed out.

It was a sign that the beast was nearby; wildlife native to the forest acted unnaturally the closer they were to its presence.

Judging by the corpse’s clothing he’d been out camping. Idiotic in these parts, but people always ignored the signs. James looked away from it, feeling a sudden pressure in his head that felt like the sound a rat’s claws made when it was scrabbling around on cement.

The chill in the air felt a few degrees colder. Sure, it was September and the dew would freeze into a thin sheet of ice every morning but this was different. Familiar. It was like the forest was breathing and the thought made James tense up. Mitzi could sense it too. There was a voice. He strained to listen.

It was unfamiliar and sounded scared.

That was a good sign. If it was a voice he recognized then he was in trouble. That’s how the beast had gotten Darryl, mimicking Holly’s voice and getting him to turn back. He crept forward slowly, following the sound of the voice until he got to a clearing. There was a pair of teens huddled together, had to be getting close to their graduation.

“I’m scared Ray,” the girl was saying, clinging to her partner’s letterman jacket.

“Me too Brooke, I don’t know what—“

James tightened the grip on his shotgun as the boy saw him.

“Don’t—don’t come any closer,” Ray said in a wavering tone.

James shook his head.

“I ain’t here to hurt you, I’m here to help.”

“Oh, cause you’re pointing a gun at us sir, that’s…” The boy trailed off and James arched an eyebrow in surprise as Ray’s eyes lit up in recognition.

“Wait, you’re old man Hawthorne right? You have the scar. Oh man, we’re sorry for trespassing, please don’t murder us. Please!”

James lowered the shotgun and signed in exasperation as the teens started to panic babble. There were rumors and stories that because he’d survived that night he had to have been the killer. He didn’t blame folk for it, the story he’d told was outlandish. And him choosing to live near the forest sure didn’t help matters. They said he liked to stay near the scene of the crime.

Never mind that he’d been trying to stop people from making the same mistake he and his friends had. He’d tried putting nuclear waste signs up around the border once, but some numbnuts on the internet had been quick to point out that the forest was not a registered dumping ground nor were there any known military installations nearby, which only made people more curious.

He’d had nine dreams that summer. Seventeen people had gone missing.

“You’ve seen it?” he ventured, speaking in what he hoped was a calming but stern voice. Fifty-three was pretty young to be called an old man, he thought wearily.

“Yeah,” the girl said, wiping tears and runny mascara away from her eyes. “It pulled Billy into a bush. We’re sorry for trespassing mister, please just let us go.”

“Oh for—get up. Get moving!” he pointed the gun in their direction and motioned for them to get up. They followed, and whether it was out of fear or relief he didn’t care. He wasn’t doing this for them.

He held his tongue. There was no point in scaring them further.

They walked in silence for several minutes before James felt his blood run cold. The leaves in the trees were rustling.

But there was no wind.

He looked up warily and regretted doing so almost immediately. There was a great big fleshy web stretched between the treetops with dozens of cocooned bumps dotting it here and there. The desiccated forms of birds, wolves and deer dangled from it precariously alongside a handful of decidedly human shaped bundles. People either unlucky enough to miss the signs or stupid enough to ignore them.

But he still wasn’t sure what the beast was. It defied categorization. Too many legs to be a spider. The few glimpses of it that he had seen on that day all those years ago suggested its torso was closer to being a humanoid than an arachnid or an insect. The girl started crying when she caught his gaze and followed it upwards but James ignored her.

He had something more important to worry about.

James looked behind them and then in front of him and felt his throat tighten.

“Mitzi?” he said worriedly.

“Who?”

“My dog!” James practically spat his response. “Now shut up! That hound is worth more than both of you idiots put together and if she’s dead on account of me trying to rescue you from your idiocy I’m gonna lose it!”

He turned away from them and started to speed up his pace.

“Mitzi?” he said a little louder, clicking his tongue. “Come on, come here girl.”

The leaves crunching underfoot gave way to soft earth and James stopped walking. It was too late in the year for dirt to be that soft. He slowly knelt down and took a handful.

Recently upturned.

That was new.

Ray kept walking, oblivious to the danger and a moment later the ground exploded in a cloud of dirt clods, dead leaves and detritus. There was a blood curling scream James forced himself to look away and started running, grabbing the girl by the wrist and ignoring her screams for Ray. He still caught a glimpse of it, four malevolent compound eyes staring at him balefully as it caved in Ray’s chest and started doing to the boy what it had done to Greg all those years ago.

“What is that thing?” she wailed.

“Don’t look at it!” he snapped. “That’s how it gets inside your head.” They stopped behind a tree and he readied his shotgun. He’d only get one shot.

“But you’re James Hawthorne. The only survivor of the Spicewood Seven.”

James shot the girl a look. “Linda Travers made it out too. She left town years ago. I should have gone with her.” He turned back in the direction they’d run from. He couldn’t hear Ray screaming anymore so it would be coming after them soon.

“Listen. Listen.” He said tightly. “This is only going to stun it. You need to keep moving. Run in a straight line until you reach the old oak tree with initials carved in it. Then make a right. You’ll see a cabin. Don’t stop there, keep going until you hit the road. I’ve never seen it go to the road. Do you understand?”

The girl, Brooke he reminded himself, nodded rapidly and ran.

He turned back just in time to see the eyes as the beast’s form undulating rapidly towards him.

“Sorry, Linda.” he muttered. It was going to be up to her to end this. It wouldn't stop until it had gotten all of them, he just knew it somehow. James fired once and then it was upon him. He began to scream.

****************

Brooke didn’t know how long she’d been running for but it felt like ages. The old man’s dying screams had died away several minutes ago and she was terrified. She was covered in scratches and lacerations from the branches whipping her as she ran and she’d lost a shoe to a patch of mud.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Billy was an idiot, she should have never let him talk her and Ray into trespassing into the woods to look for ghosts. And now—Oh, she couldn’t bear to think about it. She turned and retched on the ground.

“Oh, God…” she whimpered. But the cabin was in her field of vision. The road couldn’t be too much farther.

There was a whining noise and she almost had a heart attack. Scanning around in a frenzy, the moonlight casting everything into foreboding shadow. Her eyes alit on a furry form a few feet away from her and she gasped.

It was Hawthorne’s dog. Had to be.

What had he called it? Biscuit? Daisy? Mitzi? Yes, that was it.

It growled at her with its teeth bared, Brooke stiffened. If the dog was growling, then what was whining?

And why did it sound like it was above her?

As if on cue, the noise cut out to be replaced by a sentence in perfect English.

But it was wrong.

Scratchy. Throaty. Like the vocal chords weren’t meant to speak like that.

“Come on. Come here girl.” it said.