Paranormia

I live in a cabin in the woods. Not secluded from society; I'm just one of the few who make up the nameless society of forest dwellers in the Woodland. There's a irregular distance between each house though; no one is close enough to be a next door neighbor. My closest neighbor is Joe Marshall, a surprising clean shaven lumberjack and carpenter and he lives about half a football field away from me. Then there's Tristan the local drunk who's a decent engineer so long as he's sober,  and then Jessica Lockwood, who's the local fisher of her backyard Lake Moon.

I am the town electrician and photographer Billford Peppersprout. My friends call me Bill, my lover calls me Pepper. But I have neither, so everyone calls me Billford. I was a botanist by profession, with photography being the only hobby I can afford to keep up. Like everyone else in this nameless place, I left my minimum wage job in the cities and suburbs for the desolate solitude of the forest. The townsfolk I met upon arrival greeted me coldly; understandable given what makes the place a solitude is how few people actually live there. Now I receive lukewarm greetings whenever I happen upon a settler. To them I'm still an outsider, but so long as I do nothing to disturb the peace and quiet, I am welcome.

Why did I leave to desolation? Maybe for the peace and quiet the settlers found here, maybe because I was finally sick of the growing mass of bullshit the city folk come up with every week, who knows? One day I just packed what I needed, a few of what I wanted and left. Saw a For Sale sign on a cabin that used to belong to a old guy who passed away, liked the place and rented it from Phil Downer, who apparently own the massive stretch of land the settlers live on. That was a year ago. And during the year I lived here there's been a lot that's happened here that's unnatural.
I believe in the unnatural, too many folklore and fairytales from my dad to not believe. For some it's nothing more than a child's dream, meaningless and stupid. But for me, it's as real as a religion's god is to its believers. And strangely enough so did the other settlers.

I picked up a couple of interesting tales from Tristan during some of his drunken stupors. Mostly it was the usual supernatural sitings of Big Foot, the Wendigo and what he believes is either a skinwalker or "Der Großmann".  But one in particular caught my interest, an odd one that didn't fit in with my known knowledge  of local cryptids, not even foreign ones. But I shrugged it off a drunk's fantasy, that is until I actually saw it for myself.

It was on Thursday, seven months in of my residency in the Woodlands. I was swimming through the mountain of possessions that once belonged to my dad in the top floor of my one-floor cabin. Most of them were old pictures of either family I remembered vaguely or friends of his I never knew of. The rest consisted of old wood carvings, a broken dreamcatcher, and folders and files of something about stocks and accounts that made no sense to me (my father was a stock broker by the way). Most of everything was either broken, cracked or so unkept they could easily pass for trash, which is exactly where I wanted to dispose of most of his things. A few particular things held traces of failed attempts of care. Like the dreamcatcher, a locked diary and the flip phone.
Unlike my father I was not a fan of antiques, although the idea of a craft work of sticks, feathers and beads filtering the nightmarish from pleasantries within the mind's dreamscape seemed somewhat plausible, like the idea behind a three-leaf clover and a rosary. The diary held my interest the most, mostly because it was locked. I didn't recall seeing a key among the mountain of stuff and was really not in the mood to exert more energy to attempt to break the lock. So I shifted my attention to the flip phone.

It fell out one of the books; the poor literary work had a rectangular shape cut into a couple of its middle pages to conceal the device. The drop to the floor cracked the camera of the phone a little, but otherwise left the rest of its devices unharmed. I turned it on, surprised to find it with some power in its battery. The phone blared to life, brightly and loudly, before dimming to a home screen. I shuffled through it curiously; only three number  saved in its contact list, one of them being mine from college, the other two saved as 'Tracy' and 'Prick' . I still wonder who 'Prick' is, and what he did to earn himself the name. There were no good games on the phone aside Tetris, and my inner child moaned in disgust upon first glance. It was the gallery of pictures that held something the both held my interest and twisted my gut in a painful knot. Most the pictures were indecipherable, blurred masses of color and static that made my head hurt just looking at it. Then there were the exceptions, which showed different locations around the city and the outskirts of the Woodlands; the park near the Angel's Hospital, a side of Lake Moon I was unfamiliar with, the roof of one of the city's tall buildings, an ancient coffeeshop that was run by a nice old lady and her niece. In each of these pictures was a different outlandish thing; a tall faceless man behind the swing, with long black tentacles entangling the metal frames and reaching for the children. The trees near Lake Moon seemed to open up not to wood, sap and bugs but what looked like bones and muscle mass, the trees blanches and roots wrapped in and around a corpse and seemingly pulling it into the gapping maw that was probably its mouth. A human-sized  bat-like creature hanging from the top of a building, everything below it's torso missing save for the remnants of a bloody spine and intestines. A boy in the corner of the coffeeshop, literally smiling from ear to ear with  deep ragged cuts along his face from the corners of his mouth to his cheekbones. Each one left me with another pang in the stomach and pound to my already painful headache. I remember thinking to myself that they were definitely not real, maybe really convincing works of photo editing and stuff like that. It wasn't impossible; he'd seem the contents of the horror genre, from movies like Prometheus to games like Silent Hills and Outlast (had a friend named Winston Paul who loved to stuff of horrors and egged me into it. Regretted and still regret not saying no. Still remember the warm hot embarrassment of my pants suddenly soaking up with urine during a jump scare in The Evil Within game). It could be that, and not something that was actually real.
Then I heard a rapping and tapping on the window. It made me shudder, then panic. Because the window in question had no tree near it to produce such a sound. I remember getting up on my feet and moving over to the window, then peaking out it but not opening it. At first I saw nothing, because of course I didn't. It was probably a rogue rock rolling down the roof or an old branch departing from its parent tree. Then I blinked. Once. And wished I never moved to the window.

I must point out just out of place Tristan's drunken tales are; he sucks at mind grappling descriptions. Because lanky, skinny and eyeless with a top hat does not fully define the nightmare peering curiously through my window. It totally dwarfed the Slenderman, because it stared through my window bent over with empty eye sockets that pulsed at what grotesquely seemed like attempts to blink without eyelids and eyeballs. Its mouth hang open with a wide smile, drooling something black from its mouth with a foul smell that seeped through the woodwork of the cabin into my nostrils. I doubled over, throwing up over a box of trash, and stepped back, almost tripping over myself. The creature wore a hat, a top hat like Tristan rightfully described, but it was torn and ripped at every point and sat unnatural on its angled head. The thing raised a hand, a bony ashen thing with long grime-covered nails, and rapped on the window again. And again. And again. And again. Until it was convinced I would neither move to react nor open the window. Then its head rose out of view as it left. I could hear the rough rustling of the trees and crackling of dead branches as it made its way away, probably in search of someone more inviting of its presence. I stayed where I was on the floor, my heart pounding uncontrollably, before I managed to find my feet and make my way to the bathroom where I washed my face with cold water and downed two painkillers to drown out my immense fear. That is, before I unceremoniously slipped and knocked myself out over the sink.

I awake to a runaway rooster screaming in the front of my house and the first thought that came to mind was the nightmare I witnessed the night before. Of course having knocked myself unconscious over the sink counter I was partially convinced and desperately hoping my siting was nothing more that a nightmare induced by the contents of the phone, that after painfully viewing the pictures I headed to the bathroom for an unfortunate accident. With my head still pounding (and probably swelling) I made my way outside to the side of the house where I hoped had not see an thing over 9 feet tall. And I was woefully disappointed.

There were broken branches everywhere, not the small ones that break off with a little wind but big ones that only fall over during a rainstorm. A foul black puddle of goo rested horridly the ground under the window, and the terrible smell hit me harder than it did the night before, making me gag and choke on the odor because there was nothing to through up. Disgusted I staggered back to the front for something to clear my head and clear the mess.

"What's the matter, Mr. Billford? You look like you've seen a deadman". I jumped, my heart returning momentarily to 20 beats per second. It was Joe Marshall, delivering my share of firewood for the week. I stared blankly for a moment before I replied. "Helluva mess by the side of the house."

"Yeah I can smell it," Joe snorted hard. "Hurry and clear it up before it sits in."

"Sure." I don't like being told what to do, especially when I was just about to do it. But I said nothing more and took the sack of hacked wood and thanked him. Then just as he turned to leave I blurted, "I saw something last night."

Joe glanced at me tiredly. "Don't we all?"

I exhaled. Rudely. "I saw something....not human. Unnatural."

Joe continued to stare at me. Then he reached into the top pocket of his shirt and pulled out a cigarette and popped it in his mouth. "Best advice I can give you is to let sleeping dogs lie. Do not disturb the night, and be sure to keep your doors and windows shut."

"So you believe me?"

Joe shrugged. "I believe in what I see, and I've been here long enough to see the beauty and unholy the forest hides. Do your best not to disturb it, and it'll leave you along. Night critters only disturb what disturbs them. The daytime's our time, best to keep it that way." And with that Joe turned and left, lighting his cigar and leaving a trail of smoke behind him. I watched him leave down the pathway until he was out of sight, convinced he was letting on less than he cared to discuss, that he and probably everyone who decided to settle in these woods know something unnatural that they just kept hush about. I glanced back down the side of the cabin, the foul stench still in the air. I turned back inside in search of something strong enough to clean up the black goo and get rid of the stench. Inside my pocket, however it got there, the flip phone suddenly felt heavy.

Maybe it was time I broke the lock to that diary, and maybe hang up that broken dreamcatcher. It might be useful and if not? It makes for a nice aesthetic.

Of course after I cleaned up the unholy mess.