It was dark in the forest. Cold. Damp. As soon as the night fell, her teeth started chattering, yet she kept on walking, lost, tired, miserable, searching desperately for a place to spend the night. She stumbled over gnarled tree roots, crawled under low branches, climbed over fallen trunks, and each time she broke a twig under foot, or brushed a leaf off a tree, it seemed to her that the forest got darker, more menacing, oppressing, as if it were each time trying to lead her to her fate in the obscurity of the undergrowth.
As the moon rose in turn, a pale, wan moon that did little to illuminate her path, the trees, to which she had previously been blind to, seemed to take the forms of creatures of nightmares, twisted with age and evil, and with being confined to the soft land where the forest now grew. She jumped and let out a small scream that reverberated around the deathly quiet forest as a branch prodded her shoulder. The forest, as the night grew on, seemed to be gaining in in confidence and started to reach for her, the intruder that must be banished.
After seemingly hours of pointless wandering, she curled up on a pile of moist leaves, in the crook between two roots on a tree. But there, sleep did not find her, and her desperate search for it proved fruitless. And so she watched the forest, and it seemed to her, that with a thousand eyes, the forest was watching her right back. She turned her head to settle herself better on her bed of leaves. Wait. She turned her head back. The forest was staring back at her.
YOU ARE READING
Child of Darkness
Short StoryA young woman in a dark forest. Leaving her past behind her, turning herself towards a new, yet unknown future. But the forest holds more secrets. something- or someone- is on her trail.
