On the old Mountain

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. And I really wish it hadn’t.

For several hundreds of years, ever since civilised man began to settle these hills, there have been strange whisperings around the woods. Whisperings of things that man ain’t supposed to see, nor supposed to look at too long if he does. But I know some men that have seen these things and I’m one of them.

Back around thirty four I was a logger on these mountains. A whole lot of us worked up there, for Tarnish lumber. Used to be that near every boy in the valley was chopping trees up here, at some point or another. The job was hard on the body, but for some it was harder on the mind. You could be up there for weeks at a time, in the heat, the rain, snow, Hell even a tornado one year. It could get real primitive in camp sometimes, and not just the conditions, the men too.

I remember a lad, Tucker or some other, he about tore his hands clean off in some of the machinery, said he couldn’t take the mosquito bites no more. Another time, this foreman, Mr Randall, he got up one day and started calling himself the king of the mountain. Wasn’t until some of the men caught hold of him and slapped him about a little that he remembered his own name and took off the grass skirt he’d made himself.

Does queer things to you, this mountain. That was why, when some scruffy thing called Bill came out of the woods hollering about something he’d seen, we gave him a slap and a shot of bourbon. He took it well and it calmed him some, but later that night I overheard him whispering with two fellas outside of the camp. I was curious then, a whole lot more than I care to be now, and I snuck up on them to catch a listen.

‘It was not a tree, not a tree! I cut trees for a living, for Christ’s sake!’ Bill was saying. The others quieted him and then smoothed the rest out.

‘I was out past the slip stream, over that ridge that has the rock that looks like a nose.’

‘What were you doing out there, Bill?’ I remember one of them asking.

‘Mushrooms,’ Bill said. We all knew he was one of them, talked about living off the land and encouraging us to eat things, even tried to get me to eat ants. Anyway, Bill says; ‘I had got a good amount of them (mushrooms) rolled up in my shirt but I seen some real big ones, over that ridge. I decided to take a look see. Then something brushed up on me.’ Bill slapped his neck when he said this. ‘I turned to see what done it but there was nothing there. I go on picking the ‘shrooms and I feel it again. It’s like hairs, or webs, brushing over my skin.’

‘What did you do, Bill?’ He was asked.

‘I decided I had to leave. A man can survive anything if he knows when he ought to leave.’ Of everything he said I remember him saying that most of all. At the time though, I thought this was my cue, given to me by Bill. I thought he had seen me eavesdropping and so I decided I should leave but then he said;

‘I lit my lantern to light my way back to camp, and what I saw when I lit it up . . .’ Me, the other fellas and probably the trees all leaned in to hear what Bill was about to say.

‘People. Rows and rows of people. Standing right in front of me. But they weren’t regular-sized. With them standing still in the dark as they were, you’d take them for trees. A few beats more, they were moving. Their limbs split and cracked and moved at queer angles, like they was puppets. But the eyes, those were no puppets eyes, they were alive, alert. And they was all looking right at me.’ Bill stopped then. His face looked like someone had stuck a knife in him and he was watching them do it. The two men with him understood that Bill had reached his limit so took him off to what we called an infirmary, but what was really a spare tent that we put the sick men when we didn’t want to catch it ourselves.

Bill wasn’t the same after, started doing weird things like crying at night and pulling out his hair. The other guys chalked it up to plain mountain madness and shipped him back down to his mamma so he could snap out of it. That left me and the other two fellas with his story, but we weren’t sure if it had been the truth. We liked to believe it wasn’t, but Bill’s face that night had not been the same as Mr ‘king of the mountain’ Randall’s. It was different, scary.

A few months after, we were up the mountain again for what we hoped would be the final time that year. The job was to last three weeks and we were to cut down eight hundred trees. There were fifty of us on that work crew so I don’t need to tell you that was a tall order. Several of the men quit within a week, which only made the job harder. We knew we would get paid for what we had done if we quit, sure, but if all those trees didn’t get cut down we’d be back up the mountain earlier than we’d like and possibly around the holidays. So we kept at it. Worked near fourteen hours on most days. Even when it went dark we were still out there, lighting our lanterns and making what use of the moon we could. But those damn trees weren’t falling any faster and even when they did, they only gave way to trees that were growing on increasingly steeper hills. Got so bad we started to go ‘off-plot’. Going off-plot means to cut down trees in areas not necessarily marked on our map, so to speak. These are usually National Park trees, the protected ones. I’m ashamed to say we didn’t care about that back then, we was just thinking of home.

All that time I spared no thought for Bill or his story. If I had, I would have hoped I thought about Bill settling down, getting a good job. But I didn’t think about Bill, not until a drizzly day saw us moving past that rock that looked like a nose. When I seen that I remembered everything he said that night, about what was in them trees. Then I realised we was cutting them same trees down.

I looked at them. They were stiff, upright pines. Tall too, taller than the rest of the trees we’d been cutting down. Their dark crowns were far above in the gloomy sky, almost invisible to us. And the mist and cold that was curling in that day, got lost in their dense branches.

I turned back to the men. We had stationed ourselves in a circle around a clearing. Beyond this circle, the woods were especially dense. All that could be made out of the mountains that surrounded us was the tips of their peaks. Everything else was wood, dirt and needles.

None of the other men looked like they shared my interest in these unusual woods and continued working as usual, even those two friends of Bill’s went on chopping the trees down. Well, if they thought nothing of it? I went back to work and it was good going. We cut down a good number of large trees that day. Because of that, the foreman (Mr Genfall it was then) told us to keep going, in to the night. We were all tired but it wasn’t nothing we hadn’t done before. So we brought the lanterns out and got a fire going, like we all do when we’re in the woods after sun fall. That was when we found out the truth behind Bill’s story.

It was when the sun had truly dropped from the sky, and all the forest was lit up by us, that we started to hear noises in the trees. At first it was just creaking and swaying, like a strong wind was blowing through. Then it got louder and louder until it sounded as though the trees was being ripped and pulled apart. In the chaos the thick branches above whipped savagely and pelted us with needles.

One by one, the machines died down as more of us saw what was happening. I think it was about twenty two of us, past the ridge, and we all drifted away from the trees and in to a circle around the fire. I remember shivering, and feeling like enemies were surrounding us. We waited. We readied axes. We wouldn’t go easily, we told ourselves.

The first to go was a man named Folkson. He had been stood closest to the forest. Before it happened, we heard an awful noise, like the bark of a tree being dragged over gravel at speed. Then Folkson was gone, lifted in the air. He was screaming. We looked up and saw something holding him, crushing him. It looked right at us while Folkson’s blood spilled from its hand. After that, the men were easy pickings. One by one, terror-stricken men were snatched from the ground and crushed above our heads. A few had the sense of mind to scream as it happened.

My body moved of its own will and I found myself running, God knows where, but I was running and watching men be grabbed from the ground. I looked back for the briefest moment and saw lines and lines of people in shadow, all standing as high as the trees. I could see no features on them in the dark, only their eyes. They were like glowing pin pricks, reflecting the light from our fire and the lanterns.

I ran away from the scene. At some point I remember an older man running alongside me. I never asked his name but when he caught my eye, we made a silent pact that we’d go on together and help each other make it out. We both breathed a little easier when we came out from the trees and found that we had correctly run in the direction of camp.

The camp was all stirred up. The men there had heard the screams coming from behind us. They spilled out from all corners of the colony of tents that constituted our living space. Most came from the largest square tent, where we all bunked. They wandered toward the trees disoriented, confused, dumb.

I looked back the way we came and saw that the people amongst the trees were still coming. They had crossed the ridge and were moving with snapping, twisting limbs toward the camp. The light from the base’s fires was caught in their eyes. They glowed like strange, hollow stars floating through the trees. The rest of their features were lost to shadow but whatever it was they were made of, it made them ear-splittingly loud as they came through the woods. I remember plainly thinking that it was what the end of us sounded like.

Me and this old fella, we didn’t answer any of the questions we were asked as we came through camp, we just ran. I was gripping the cuff of the old guy’s shirt sleeve and we ran blindly, looking only at where our feet would fall. We didn’t realise in our caution that we was ascending the mountain and not going down it. The old man began to fall behind so I picked him back up. He told me we wouldn’t make it if we went on the way we were. At that point, I reckoned I had gleaned something from Bill’s story and from what had just happened to the work crew below.

‘It’s the light,’ I said to my man ‘It stirred them up.’ When I said it out loud like that, it felt like fact.

‘Well, there ain’t lights up there.’ The old timer said. He was pointing to the ancient, abandoned cabin that sat decrepit on a boulder on the side of the mountain. We had asked foremen in the past if we could take a spell in there, make a change from tents and all. But we always got told no ‘cause it was “someone’s property”. Under the circumstances however, I felt the owners would forgive us our trespass.

When we got up on the little porch, we felt slightly more at ease, or I did at least. The screams of the men were fading and we both agreed that we hadn’t been followed. Unfortunately, we found the cabin door to be shut up and nailed down. We discussed the possibility of a kitchen door so I volunteered to steer off around the back and find another entry. When I got around back I did find another door but it was just as boarded over. I thought perhaps a window could be gotten it to and while I searched about for a loose one, I thought I saw movement from within. A tall person I thought, moving their head strangely. But I couldn’t be sure so I went back to the porch and told old fella about it. He got off the stoop he was sat on and walked around with me. Again we saw someone moving about.

‘Hello?’ I called out. Something inside the cabin smashed. I grabbed the cuff of the old man ready to run again. Then a face appeared in the window.

‘Bill?’ He had lost all of his teeth along with his hair and clothes but it was definitely him. He squinted to get a good look at us. I don’t think he could see who or what we was because he pulled out a candle and placed it on the window ledge of the cabin. I stiffened. I don’t know what the old fella did but Bill, he was smiling. He smiled at us and lit the candle. When the light hit his face I fell back. His skin had turned hard and callous and was becoming darker in colour. He was taller too. He had to bend his body in two for his face to be level with the window. Before I knew what was happening a strange, gnarled hand came out of the window and grabbed the old man by the face. He wailed and thumped the thing feebly. Then behind us, the trees started up creaking again. In that moment I remembered what Bill had said when he told his story that night, on the edge of camp.

‘A man can survive anything if he knows when he ought to leave.’ I left that old man. And Bill. Left them in the trees. I’d like to say they made it out or that I simply don’t know their fate, but I knew what those screams was. I ran from them. Ran like Hell. Sometimes feel like I’m still running. That’s why I’d tell anyone; be careful what you go lighting up because some things ain’t supposed to be seen by man.