The little shelter held off the rain admirably enough, though the roof’s soft pitter-patter filled my heart with an unendurable expectancy like the continual tunning of instruments by an unseen orchestra, a chaotic medley before, before—and that was what unnerved me so, that I did not know what was coming next.
I had a little fire with me, some ancient oil lamp. It was the only heat I found that night, and I huddled next to that small flame shivering and damp. At some point, sleep took me.
At some hour after, I cannot tell when, I stirred. I was still curled around the lamp, and as I opened my eyes, I saw through the pair of rain-pelted windows on either side of the door, the faces. A crowd of ghastly countenances, contorted in hate and hunger, staring lifelessly at me.
These shadowy things seemed to see me seeing, and in the next flashing of lightning, the nightmare was gone. How long I lay there, shivering with cold and now fear, I cannot tell. Sleep, a type of sleep, a dark unconsciousness in which lived no dream, took me, and I knew nothing in that oblivion until light struck my face.
Dawn had climbed above the trees and was shining into the little cabin I had found. In its welcome warmth, I stretched and rose and forgot the night’s troubles and the burnt out wick of the lamp. I might have forgotten it all, but for the rain, for how it softened the earth. When I stepped out into that glistening, clean morning, my head lifted up to heaven, my wandering eyes spied the upturned earth. Would that I had not looked down!
Oh that little field was trodden, the grass overturned by a stamped. Impressions of human soles were left everywhere, branching off in all directions, a confused explosion with the cabin its center.
Whatever those hateful specters were that night, they had left undeniable tracks in the mud. I have never returned to those haunted woods.
Tale Told 
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