SHATTERED FATE: A Gothic Tale

PART ONE

Fallweather, Massachusetts

Autumn, 1917

The binding on her notebook had come loose and its pages scattered on the wind like feathers. They twirled and tangled with fallen leaves and nested at the edge of the forest where they crackled against the underbrush, quivering in their escape. Unwilling to lose her notes to the blustery autumn thunderstorm, Frances March chased after them.

One by one, pages disappeared into darkness beyond the path. When she reached the boundary where the road met the wood, she paused. Her boots teetered on the brink of trespassing. The forest was forbidden for as long as she could remember and cursed all who dared enter it.

Rumors spun like a spider's web and crisscrossed her mind until it was made up. Just this once she would stray. Her notes couldn't be lost in the storm, for classmates were depending on her. The rumors must only be symptoms of a fragile mind. She was frightened but not faithless.

Lifting the hood of her cloak to ward off the fingers of cold rain, she entered the forest. Color had been cast out of the leaves, drained by the death of autumn. Boughs arched overhead like wooden buttresses carved with festering bark. A nip of wind shrieked past her cheek, numbing her face and ears with its bite.

Her breathing was sharp and livid, her uneven heartbeat drowned out by the squelch of moldering earth at her feet. Its loamy odor was marked by decaying moss and wood rot, the bursting of spores beneath logs as large as caskets.

One paper clung to a patch of dead brambles, each barb punctured through the damp paper, the penciled-in words now faded and lost to the rain. She could not find the rest of them. As she reached to the ground to retrieve it, an unearthly cackle rendered her useless in its echo.

Frances couldn't hold the dread in her body any longer. She relented, regretfully, to her fears. Everyone was right to warn people to stay away from this place. It sucked the life from her lungs, the vision from her sight, the light from between the leaves. Every shadow bled out before her until she was locked inside her own mind, paralyzed by the fright of it all. Fear grabbed her by the neck as she staggered through the dark tunnel of trees.

What made the sound? What made it? Who made it? What made it? Thoughts resounded louder and louder in her head, over and over again, a crazed chant.

On and on she ran, senselessly following the chilling laugh, letting its trance lure her in, because her mind would never rest unless she knew what creature haunted her. She had to find out, or her imagination would invent more frightful monsters than a forest could. She didn't know how long she ran, but the mud morphed into fog beneath her feet and the rain changed into a fine mist.

The cackle came from her left, so loud it reverberated in her skull, making it prickle like threads pulled tight through the eye of a needle. Wheeling around, she gasped when, through the haze, a tree house appeared. Abandoned years past, it was perched in a high cottonwood, its mottled roof caved in upon slumping pockmarked shoulders. Crooked planks like jagged teeth were screwed in the tree trunk, leading up to where the noise called out.

Frances climbed, with the note clenched in her fist, unsure of her compulsion, only that it would relieve the fear in her mind. One hand over the next, one foot after the other. The noise was louder now, a wretched screech. She put one foot on the floor of the tree house, then the other. One more step. Her skirt brushed a knot of twigs and grass.

Crunch.

Frances looked down to find the rancid red and yellow ooze of a crushed bird's egg clinging to her boot. The tang of the dead reached her nostrils and she bit her tongue to hold back the nausea rising in her throat.

A black bird flung itself from the slanting rafters, its wail now a cacophony of terror in her brain. It cried and cawed, brandishing its bill and its orange-clawed feet in attack.

"Be gone, be gone, be gone!"

The bird spoke in a clear, harsh tone. Words that sounded human came from its sharply hooked beak. She read malice in its beady eyes.

Frances was a murderer.

A scream was caught in her chest.

She should not have come.

Back and back she inched. She tried to climb down, shielding her face from the winged monster. Her shoe slipped on the mucous from the egg's shell and as the enormous bird descended upon her head, she let go of the splintered planks.

Down, down, down she fell, watching black feathers blind her, and she hit the ground without a breath left to scream upon.

"Be gone, gone, gone."

It was the last thing she heard.