The Withering Woods

June 15th, 1956

The horrors of the war will be something I can never unseen. Those moments of fear and anguish are etched permanently into the walls of my mind, constantly replaying whenever I let my guard down. So, here I am, after another sleepless night, attempting to empty my head of these horrible visions and thoughts, as I was told to do. The doctors said writing down what is keeping me awake may possibly help, so here goes. Most of what I see is a replaying of the past, what I went through during the war mostly, which is bad enough, but some of what I see is not, and every nightmare ends in the same way.

Something yet to come?

I do believe what I experienced in those misty woods in northern France was something that cannot be explained, at least with our current methods of science and overall understanding of the world at this point in time.

My name is Walter Locklear, and this is my tale.

I’ll begin at the point in which my nightmares always seem to start; at the point in which I am fleeing through the foggy woods and getting separated from my detachment during a firefight with the Nazis. I remember hearing the shouts of the enemy soldiers, not being able to understand what they were saying as their voices echoed in the woods around me. There was a point in which I dropped down as I heard machine-gun fire spraying lead all around me, the bullets whizzing past my ears and lodging into the trunks of the trees. I was clasping my rifle, an M1 Garand as if it were a life preserver on a turbulent stormy sea because that was exactly what it was at that moment. I knew I wasn’t going to make it back out of this, and I remember checking myself constantly to make sure I wasn’t hit. Sometimes you just didn’t even know until your guts were spilling out, the damn adrenaline running thick in your blood.

As I ran my hands over my chest, I felt the old coin in my pocket. It was an old family heirloom, something my grandmother told me to keep with me. She said it would keep me safe as it did my great grandfather during the war between the states back in 1862, during the absolute bloodbath that was Antietam. It was an old coin. Much, much older than the American Civil War. As I hold it now, it looks to be possibly Roman or Greek in origin, but I can’t tell. The thing is possibly priceless and worth a fortune to some collector, and here I was, running around with it in my breast pocket on a battlefield in France. As the bullets lodged themselves in a tree trunk mere inches from my head, I remember wondering why in the hell I even worried about bringing the damn thing. All I knew was at that time, the cold steel making up the barrel of my rifle felt a hell of a lot more substantial than some old coin.

I heard voices, speaking German, and the approach of footsteps. Some of them were even laughing. They were getting close and I clasped the gun tight, feeling my heart racing, pulsing through to my fingers and toes. I took a breath and leaned around the edge of the tree, firing off two shots, the loud cracks of the rifle echoing off the trees. I saw one of the Nazis drop, a rare headshot as the pieces of the man’s head exploded like a melon, and I returned to my cover position as the enemy returned an overwhelming amount of fire. I will remember that horrid sight forever, the way that man’s head practically disintegrated. It was a stupid decision on my part, I’ll have to admit. There were at least nine of them in their little squad and only one of me, alone and separated, and one of the precious eight shots in my Garand’s clip went sailing off hitting nothing more than fog and tree bark.

To be frank, I was up shit creek and fell out the damn boat.

 I did the only thing I could think to do in that situation and took off running, weaving through the trees, doing my best to avoid the flying lead from their rifles - a consistent cacophony of ear-ringing chaos. I couldn’t hear anything else as I dipped and twisted around low hanging branches, some of which were blasted off as I moved to duck below them.

Oh, I knew I was dead meat then and there. There was no getting out of this without some form of backup. With those two shots, I practically signed my own death certificate, and now I only had six left.

I hadn’t realized it, but the fog around me had become much denser and was possibly the only thing keeping my simple ass alive.

Or could it be the coin?

I had hardly noticed that the sounds of my pursuer’s rifles were now beginning to fade away. Something strange was happening to the trees as I ran further and further through the thickening fog. The air was heavier here, and it almost stifled my breath as I ran from tree to tree, still attempting to use them for cover. It was then that I got my first good look at them. The bark was not brown at all but now becoming pale and smooth. Almost flesh-like, and cold, as weird as it sounds. The look of them was unnatural. It was when the thought arose of translucent and bruised skin of a long-dead corpse, that I heard the first agonized scream echoing from the forest.

Compared to the rifles, the scream seemed somehow louder as it cut through the eerie quiet. I turned to look, but fell forward, my foot caught in a root, and came crashing hard to the ground. I scrambled to get back up, grabbing my rifle and turned toward the sound of footsteps fast approaching. As I did, a Nazi soldier burst from the fog, running my direction. I tried to get my weapon up in time, but I knew it was too late.

He had me.

Or he would have if he had been trying to kill me. Instead, the man ran right by me as I lifted my rifle, bayonet poised to attack. He fled, whimpering and disappearing into the fog.

I stood there for a moment, panting and trying to understand what had just happened. I had seen the man’s eyes, but it took me a moment to recognize the pure, unthinking terror I saw there. This man wasn’t worried about fighting. He was trying to flee. Turning, my foot caught the same root, but when I looked down, I saw that it was no root, but a bone sticking out of the soil that had stopped my flight. It looked to be a human femur.

This should have frightened me much more that it did, but days earlier I had taken part in the invasion of Normandy, and that salty trudge through a quite literal Hell had exposed me to several lifetimes worth of horror, so I didn’t think too much of seeing a single bone sticking out of the dirt. I decided to run the opposite direction in which I was hearing the other soldiers heading, in hopes of slipping away from them.

More and more screams began to erupt from the forest. I couldn’t understand why they were screaming like that. If I find myself out in the woods during a thin fog, I can still hear those screams. Haunting, animalistic screams, the kind you hear from a slaughterhouse.

That’s why I don’t hunt very much anymore.

I kept running, as hard as I dared, not caring about how much noise I was making because those men were making enough sounds with their dying. It was because I was running so hard that I didn’t see what caused me to trip yet again. I rolled and my gun fired, cracking loudly in the fog. I got to my feet as quickly as I could, reaching for my rifle yet again, but when my eyes leveled at what I had tripped over, my body grew numb.

It was a little girl, possibly around nine or ten years old. She was dead, dead for a few days at least, her skin mottled and gray, damn near resembling the trees. Now, I saw a lot of killing in my time during the war, but that little girl was probably the most devastating thing I had ever seen. I remember her cloudy eyes were open wide, her mouth frozen in a snarling grimace, as if in the midst of unimaginable pain.

Then the eyes turned to meet mine. I stumbled backward into one of those trees - the cold fleshiness of its surface sent a spike of repulsion through my veins. I pushed myself off it only to see yet another corpse lying at the base. This one was a teenage boy. I looked down upon him in horror at the state in which some animal had eviscerated and disemboweled him. Then, the corpse then let out a deafening, hollow scream that radiated down to my bones, nearly causing me to wet myself. Then the girl began to scream in the same awful way, and I saw to my horror that all the other trees had corpses beneath them. They were all teenagers or kids, some of them not much younger than me, and were strapped to the trees with rusty, deteriorating chains. They groped and reached for me through the fog as I tried to keep my distance from them.

In my panic, I barely noticed the dark figure emerging from the fog. The thing was tall, willowy, wearing a black shroud that fluttered in some wind that I could not feel. Two curved horns stood pronounced upon its head as it glided towards me making no sound that I could hear. Instinctively I brought the gun up and managed to fire two shots into it. The rifle’s shots sounded muffled, as if underwater. The bullets which were fired at point black range had no effect.

It was my turn to scream then as the thing, whatever it was, sent something sharp deep into the right side of my chest.

I remember looking at its face, trying to look into the eyes of the thing that was ultimately going to kill me, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what I saw. The only thing I remember is the searing pain in my chest from being stabbed, or at the time that’s what I thought had happened. The thing began to let loose an earth-shattering roar before it began to back away and a bright light appeared from the burning spot in my chest.

Flames erupted across the breast of my uniform and I dropped to the ground in a panic that was entirely different from being killed by something that shouldn’t exist. When I did so, the coin fell to the ground and I picked it up, noticing that one side had been charred black. The thing, still gripping its hand, bellowed at me in a language I couldn’t recognize, the ground quaking from it. I got to my feet, prepared to run, but the creature didn’t lunge or give chase.

It just stood there, clutching at its still smoldering hand. I heard a voice far off, a woman’s voice. She was calling my name, whoever it was. I backed away slowly from the creature, careful to avoid the still clutching corpses of the children, and followed the voice through the thick fog. The corpse-like trees began to groan then, their branches swaying subtly at first, but soon lashing out with enough force to throw me down. I remember the fog thickening ever further, and the groaning of the trees, the horrifying sight of the branches swinging for me. My throat had almost constricted because of the thickness that hung in the air, and then, it was all gone.

The heaviness, the fog, even the voice. The trees were normal, tall pine trees again. No groaning, no swinging, no corpses. I found myself at the edge of the forest; the sky was a sheet of gray and a light fog lined the horizon. Through it, I could just make out a group of soldiers coming my way over the field and the olive drab of their uniforms.

It was my lost contingent.

I remember heading out to meet them, but instead of being greeted by disbelief as I had in reality, in my dream I find myself standing out there alone in the same spot where I found the soldiers, and a darkness has fallen over the field. I was surrounded by small patches of blazing fires in the distance and I can hear things moving about, unseen.

Then I see the bodies. Thousands upon thousands of corpses lie in the field and I can just make out some of their broken and decomposing faces. I never know who it is, but a woman is standing beside me, a woman cloaked in a black shroud. I like to believe this is the woman that called out to me in the woods, the one that led me to safety, but I cannot be sure. Something tells me that she is tied to this coin somehow, or perhaps tied to me. She accompanies me at the end of the replaying of my experience in the misty horror-filled woods always telling me the same thing:

“Your world lies at the brink of desolation. Heed not the warnings, or a realm of death and shadows awaits you all.”

It’s then that I can just make out the things shambling amongst the corpses and… just bringing it to mind almost stills my heart. It’s that heart-stopping fear that grips me upon waking in a torrent of gasping breaths. I’m not sure if I wake screaming, as I live alone, now separated from my wife. I clutch the coin, hoping that I never need to use the opposite side, but knowing that its always there should I need it.

Editor’s note: The last page of the diary was splattered with blood and only one sentence was scrawled there with enough force to rip through the paper. It read:

YOU ARE THE SHADOW YOU FEAR.

YOU WILL CARVE YOUR WORLD’S UNDOING.

Walter was found dead in his locked cabin a month after his entry, and the coin he spoke of was never recovered by authorities. Though the body was already in the advanced stages of decomposition, the ink of the crudely scrawled text in the open journal was fresh, as if it had been penned moments before their forced entry.  

XXX

Logan woke with a start. The room was a sea of darkness, but a light scratching sound was cutting through the silence. He looked at his phone to see the time was nearly two in the morning. He got up, switching on his bedside lamp, sending a dim light across the sparse studio apartment. Blinking, he groggily walked over to the desk where the sound was coming from and he wondered if it was just a weird hallucination. Logan pulled the small top drawer open and saw something astonishing, even in his half-awake condition.

An incredibly old coin, some collector’s item he had held onto, was stored there amidst other random knickknacks and junk. The coin was charred black on both sides, a chemical burn from the looks of it. The coin was standing upright and spinning on its edge. Logan stared at it in disbelief.

There was a vague memory about some awful tree and a girl that he had associated with the coin, but the memory was muddled, a thought that seemed to flit out of sight as soon as he tried to zero in on it. The coin had come from his grandmother and she had told him it had saved his grandfather during World War II, though at the time, he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t sure he believed it now, up until this moment.

It was too early in the morning for this shit. He thought and went to stop the coin, but it instantly flew into the air. As he watched it, the burnt coin seemed to catch the light of the bedside lamp. The flicker of light grew to a blinding blaze of searing gold that caused him to close his eyes, leaving an imprint there as if he had just stared at the sun. Squinting, he caught the coin mid-flip and opened his hand to see that the coin’s surface was now clear of the burn and the “tails” side shone up at him. It was shiny now, as if freshly minted, the image of a tri-faced woman standing, holding a torch in one hand, and a key in the other. He read the word minted to one side and felt a searing heat radiate up his arm. It wasn’t a painful heat, just powerful, and not something one was ready for at two in the morning.

Then he remembered everything. The girl he had saved, his sister, Julia, who had died nineteen years ago. It had been ten years since his time at the withering tree, the night he had shot dead all those cult members.

Except for the one that got away.

He also remembered the face of the thing that had nearly driven him mad and felt a cold bolt of panic ripple through him. The being of shadow with a pale face that he could only bring forth in horrible bits and pieces, never making up a whole. Jagged teeth, a drooping snout, sunken eyes of searing flame, and tall, jagged horns. The coin was incredibly warm and seemed to flicker like a candle flame in his palm, bringing him back to the moment. A power seemed to thrum from within it. He could almost see it rippling in the air around his hand, like heat off the hood of a car in the summertime. The word inscribed upon the coin was something he couldn’t read, but a word resonated in his mind.

HEKATE

Hadn’t that been the Greek Titan associated with magic and witchcraft? He remembered that from somewhere…

The coin thrummed again, sending heat down his arm, an assuring heat. What the hell was he supposed to do with the coin? A voice came to him then. Not a ghostly voice, but a voice from his deep past. It was his sister, she had been handing him something, a spare coin for an arcade at the boardwalk when they were kids.

“It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”

It was a line from the original Legend of Zelda game, a game series she had been obsessed with. Was he supposed to go on a quest now? What did all this mean?

Before he could think any further, the lamp beside his bed went out.