Run

On the third day of my journey, I saw one. There are few pathways in those woods, and I had to climb over a knobby mound of raised roots where an old tree had fallen. It was more for exhaustion’s sake than any preoccupation with my own safety—for I tell you, I had no faith in the tales I had heard from youth, an oft repeated story from oft repeated liars—that I paused there and let my eyes settle upon the interwoven mists that threaded the dark outlines of the bare trees. It had been three days, as I have said; three days of proof. My pursuers had not pursued once I had passed into the trees. In their minds, once I was under those boughs, I was dead.

Truth be told, I might have passed only along the forest’s border, a place I now know is safe from them, and reconnoitered easily with you all in about the same time but for that perversity in my nature to prove a point. I always take things too far. So, I went through the heart of the forest, and as I have said, three days into that journey, resting on a mound of twisted roots, I saw the figure of a man.

In the fog, the form only was there, like a shadow stumbling in from the distance, and had I not been out of breath and a little startled too to meet another soul in those woods, I would have given a foolhardy and deadly hail to the stranger, again more to thumb my nose at our self-exalted “teachers” who speak with authority of things they do not know thinking it a virtue of theirs to say aught, not for the truthfulness of the words, but more as an incantation, seeking by mere sounds and gestures influence over those of us they wish to rule. A sacred trust to lie.

As I watched, though, the strange figure came into sight; it was naked, its skin like worn leather, its eyeless face and gaping mouth frozen in the stiffness of death. It moved jerkily toward me, its head tilted to one side. I had not seen its breath ere now, but it stopped, and I watched as its boney sides expanded like the blacksmith’s bellows. Then a great stream of white breath issued from its unclosing maw as it moaned and, the moan growing in pitch, screeched in a sound that, had a living man made it, would have been a death cry. My heart surely stopped. This wonder seemed too terrible for me, yet more; out of the unseen shadows and obscuring fog, new cries answered. A chorus of the damned, uncounted shrieks filled the air with terror.

I ran. I have been running ever since.