The Bone Woods

"Don't go into the bone woods" the old woman would say as I crossed the bridge, every day. She was a crazy old crone as we all knew. But that didn't mean she wasn't telling the truth. The words echoed in my head bouncing around in the space between my ears sending chills down my spine.

We all knew she had seen things, things that no one should ever see. She had seen where the children went when they were stolen from their beds. She warned us, oh she warned us to never go near the bone woods. For the hungry children who had been taken from their beds would take you too.

Our parents told us that she was just a crazy old woman and that we should pay her no mind, but that the bone woods was a dangerous place, especially after dark. But our parents wanted us to fear normal everyday kinds of danger like wolves and falling into the river when you could not swim. The old woman's words were much more practical.

She knew that if you went far enough into the bone woods, that you would find rot and decay, that in the woods lay wicked secrets and unturned earth. This place was far from prying eyes. Where the bones of children lie.

The children knew the old woman's stories were true, even if our parents just said she was insane. But we knew better to go into the bone woods. Especially alone. Especially at night. But children know just because your crazy doesn't mean your wrong. So we do not go into the bone woods, especially alone, especially at night.

Because that is where the skeletal remains of children lay and wait and steal away your soul in the dead of night. Into the woods, they will see and they will hide you away from the light and from the hope. If you go into the bone woods at night and you make it home, you will be stolen away from your room in the dead of night, away from the warmth and the light.

I made that mistake.

I was late home one evening and ran down beside the stream, I heard the teens drinking song first and on the wind, the old woman's words echoed "do not go into the bone woods" yet one night I did such a thing, I went into the bone woods alone at night no less and oh the things I saw.

The wind bellowed through the bone woods, sounding like the forlorn cries of someone lost among the protruding white edge of trees. Something in their skeletal nature whispered as I crept along the path.

Stumbling along into the icy water of the river bed, it covered me in mud as I looked around at the piles of bones that lay at the bottom of the creek and the hangman's noose high above me a symbol of the dead. Without thinking, I pulled myself out of the sludge and slime. I ran looking back over my shoulder, fear caught in my throat. I ran so fast I slammed into the portcullis the sewer grate and I looked up at a creature that was not human but not quite anything other than human. It was tall and gaunt with enormous hands and feet; it had giant eyes and a foaming mouth with sharp teeth.

I would have let out a scream if I could, but it was caught in my throat as I fell back into the wetness of the river bank. Putting as much distance between the thing and me as I could. I staggered to my feet and ran, not looking back, scared of what I might see if I did.

As I ran, I could hear the children singing and the teens roaring with laughter as they danced and I could hear the adults scream and it was all pain, all stuffed inside me. All inside my head with no way to escape.

I had one singular thought, to move towards the village, away from the death and decay, not sure what would come next, not sure if I would die before I made it there. Feeling the fiery breath of a beast at my backside, I moved, feeling it close the distance between us. Fear twisting my guts as I moved ever forward.

I came to the mass graves of children not so unlike myself who had been unlucky enough to walk through the bone woods alone at night. I saw the unturned soil moved with life below the surface. The ghostly shadows of tall slender people with no faces that still seamed to stare.

I had once long ago thought the woods were named for the trees which white as bone against the night sky. But now I saw it was so much more gruesome than that. Named for the mass grave of the children's mangled body's grotesque and rotting and yet still alive with the children's screams of horror. Wandering in endless pain and torment.

I shivered and continued past the gravesite and found a hangman's noose high above marking the mass graves and I wondered how many dead children lay in this riven.

The horror of it etched into my retina for the rest of my days I suddenly saw all the shadows and nightmarish creatures there in the woods, and by the time I reached the bank of the river, I found it was too slippery to climb and had to go around onto the bridge. Climbing up into the road as the early morning sun reached over the top of the hills. Not sure how I was still alive.

I waited all night in the woods with such a fright and scare, knowing if I went to my bed they would bore me away forever to be alive in a deathly way, decaying and rotting and dead yet still screaming endlessly in terror.

Now they call me mad, for I see all the darkness that the old woman saw, I see the shadows and death the presides over this place. Where it lays inside us all and I am scared for what lies in the bone woods.

So head my warning does not go into the bone woods. Especially alone, especially at night.