The Lich

Lila watched as the snowflakes drifted past the window in the dark winter night. Just beyond, multi-colored Christmas lights danced and flickered, illuminating the house in a chromatic blissful light. Holding her mug of hot cocoa, Lila thought about what her brother was doing.

  Of course, he wasn’t doing anything. He had died the past summer in a freak accident. That’s what everyone had said. She hadn’t seen him since he left the house that fateful July morning, his backpack on, going on an adventure in the woods with his friends.

The funeral had been a closed casket affair and though Lila was only twelve, she understood what that had meant. Her brother was an unrecognizable mass of torn flesh and broken bones. She had nightmares, many of which her brother would appear to her, his face a caved in hole from where his head had been smashed, face first onto a six-inch-wide tree branch. He would stand, his skin ghostly white against the black and green of the dark forest, his flesh and clothes picked at by crows and other creatures. He would beckon her to come with him into the darkness. Those nights, though rare, she would wake up screaming. Last night was the worst, though. It had been snowing, but in the dream it was as warm as it had been in July when her brother’s corpse lay moldering in woods, as it did for nearly a month before it was found.

 Beneath her bare feet she could feel the cool, wet grass between her toes and smell something like putrefying meat on the subtle breeze. She shivered, and for a moment, the most horrible moment, she actually believed she was standing out in her backyard which sat against the woods, looking at her brother’s ravaged corpse.

Ravaged by the lich that lived deep in the woods.

Lila didn’t know what a lich was. She supposed it was some kind of spirit creature, like a ghost or something. Her brother had believed in it, as did many of the other neighborhood kids. Tony Rollins swore he saw it before he heard Lila’s brother screaming. Two boys died that day in the woods, and three of them came out, severely traumatized.

She stared out into the snow, a sight that normally would have brought happiness, but instead she just felt cold.

Felt empty.

Cold and empty as her brother’s bedroom upstairs, a place she refused to go into after his death. Her parents went in there from time to time. She would try to ignore the quiet sobs as she passed the doorway in the mornings as she hurried down to breakfast, or at night just before bed.

 She had tried to find her brother. Got everything ready in a backpack to go and bring him home a day after the event, but she was stopped by her father. That was the day three of the five boys made it out of the woods. The ones that would survive but would be scarred forever because of what they would claim to have seen.

The grown-ups had believed there had been some squatter that lived out in the woods that was killing kids. They searched the area for months for a sign of someone living out there but there was no trace of another human anywhere for miles. The woods were vast, deep, and dark, and Lila knew in her heart that what happened to her brother wasn’t something that the grownups could understand. Her parents especially because of their professions in the medical and engineering fields. They didn’t have room in their busy minds for ghosts and monsters. The world they lived in didn’t accommodate it.

Lila believed her brother’s friends. She knew to believe them because of what she had seen several months earlier while sitting in the back yard playing by herself one day. It was only a partial glimpse, but it was enough to send her screaming into the house to her mother who was sitting in the living room reading a book. It was tall, shrouded in black, and peering at her around the edge of a tree. Its pale, spindle-like fingers curved around the bark as its coal-black eyes glittered at her. The wrinkled, pale face broke into a half-grin as it slunk, shadow-like, back into the forest without another noise.

Lila pulled her eyes away from the window as her mother called out to her from the other room to get ready for bed. The cocoa in her mug was cold, so she dumped it out, not wanting to drink it anyway. Her mind was far away from any Christmas cheer, and even jolly old Saint Nick couldn’t bring her out of this. In her mind she kept seeing her brother and knew that tonight the dream would return. She could feel it as a palpable thrum as she brushed her teeth and even as her parents tucked her in, something that usually got the bad little ghosties, as her father called them, to go away. She understood deep down that this thing wasn’t some bad little ghostie. This was for real, not just a little kid afraid of the dark, but a real terror. Something that could reach out, grab you…

Cave your face in…

End your life.

She lay in the dark, the Christmas lights dancing outside, casting maddening shapes along her walls. Shapes of monsters. One flash of the lights caused a corner of her room to illuminate, and she swore she saw someone standing there. The cycle of lights went through again, but this time there was nothing there. Sighing, she turned in bed and snuggled into her blankets. She was getting too worked up. She closed her eyes and tried her best to fall asleep. The sound of tinkling bells came from a spot not far from her face.

She opened her eyes.

Nothing was there.

She closed them again, beginning to feel more irritated than fearful. For a moment she thought that it may be a good idea to go sleep with mom and dad, but she cast the idea aside. She understood that they weren’t too keen on her sleeping with them. They never came out and told her so, but it was plainly obvious to her when she was fearful and showed up at their door in the night. The sighs of her mother and her father’s groans.

The tinkling came again. This time it was accompanied by a smell that reminded her of when she dropped the carton of eggs out of the fridge when they had gone bad. Her eyes were open and in the sequence of the multi-colored Christmas lights outside, she saw not a person standing right at the edge of her bed, but a floating face.

A luminous, wrinkled face was grinning at her from a couple feet away. She jumped back, nearly falling from the bed and saw to her horror that the face started to rise into the air. The Christmas lights outside began flickering as the creature standing in her room produced a low, gurgling chuckle. In the flickering light she could make out a being hunched over against the ceiling, a mangled body of what looked like black, tangled tree roots binding it together in a loose representation of a human form. It reached out a gnarled hand at her face and she screamed as a rough, bark-like finger caressed her cheek.

“Scream all you want.” It said in a growl, but behind the growl, she could hear a voice that froze her heart.

Her brother’s voice.

“I have you in my power. No one can help you. No one… but yourself.” And the thing let loose a maniacal, howling laugh, and the laugh was that of her dead brother’s, but it was stifled as though tree roots had tried to bind its throat closed.

“What do you mean, no one but myself?” Lila asked.

“It was you who called me here, and it is only you that can destroy me.” It said in a sort of croon. It made rasping noises as it breathed, the sound of it nearly causing Lila’s own throat to close in on itself. The lights flickered on and off once more in a chaotic display. Lila saw that the strange wooden armor the thing wore was actually a cloak, and within the center of the creature’s bare ribbed chest was a dark red crystal the size of a grapefruit. Lila had seen crystals before, rubies even, but she had never seen one that large in her life. It was there for the briefest moment before the ruby slipped back into darkness.

The sight of the ruby gave Lila an idea. She thought of the Grinch of all things. It even sounded like a lich. Perhaps the way to defeating this creature wasn’t to fight against it, but to…

Make its heart grow? How she could think of such a thing in the face of the monster that so brutally murdered her brother was unnerving, and it sent a shock of revulsion through her, but something… something was telling her that this monster couldn’t see the good in the world, and it would set it off balance. She took a breath and looked into the face of the creature, a creature that looked utterly horrid, but could have once been a human. Been a life, once lived. She didn’t want to think about how the creature now looming before her had formed. She didn’t want to understand how it was that this lich had found her and managed to get into her bedroom. All Lila was concerned about was how to save this wretched creature. For in saving the lich, it meant saving herself also.

“Remember when…” Lila began, faltered, but took a breath and started once more, steeling her voice with a bravery that seemed to transgress her age.

“Remember last Christmas, when you woke me up because you couldn’t wait to give me my present?” She asked. The creature tilted its ugly head in confusion. But Lila wasn’t speaking to the creature, but to the voice it had stolen from her brother.

The only part that she could touch.

“I do.” The creature said, only it was in her brother’s voice.

“What was it that you gave me?”

The creature’s eyes widened, and it spoke in her brother’s voice once more, only this time the voice was smoother, gentler.

“It was a music box I had found.” The voice came from the creature’s mouth, the eyes blinked in confusion and, what Lila was quickly realizing was utter horror.

“NO!” It snarled; the voice of her brother was gone. A long, gnarled claw swiped at Lila, but it didn’t make contact. As the gnarled arm flew through the air, it stopped as if an unseen hand seized it.

Both the creature and Lila froze, Lila staring at the creature’s clawed hand in utter horror, the lich in confusion. Lila looked back at the creature and saw that the wrinkles in its face had somehow deepened. The glow of its eyes was more fierce now, pulling its arm back away from the little girl as if withdrawing it from tar.

“Remember your birthday last year? The one where you finally got to go to that go-cart track you always wanted? Remember the race you won that day? Jonathan, you are still in a race. You are still here, and you can defeat this creature. You can do this.” She was saying things now, saying them faster than they could come to mind. The creature began to stalk away from the girl now, the look of confusion crumbling to that of unmitigated horror.

It froze against the wall, and all Lila could make out was the glowing of the eyes as they peered at her, almost meekly. The voice of her dead brother came through.

“I remember. I remember, Lila. I just… I can’t see you. I can hear you, but I can’t see you. It’s so cold down here. I don’t know how…” He whimpered. At this, Lila got out of bed and, before she realized what she was doing and moving on instinct alone, she rushed at the creature standing in the darkened corner of the room. Ignoring its guttural scream, she ran full force into it and gave it a crushing hug.

She remembered her Christmas list her mother had told her to write for Santa this year. She had left it blank because she didn’t know how to ask for what she wanted most. She wanted her older brother back. Some part of her knew that Santa wasn’t the one to ask.

It was something she had to do herself.

She wrenched backwards, her arms clutching hold of a waist. She felt the thing fighting against her, clawing at her arms and face, but as she pulled, she felt strange, fibrous attachments snapping loose, each one emitting a loud cracking pop that seemed to echo down to some unknown depth. She wrenched who she knew deep down to be her brother from the fastenings of the creature and listened to it stomp around the room, and with a sudden crash, go sailing though the window, out into the snowy night.

As Lila held onto her brother, she felt him slip away a moment before the sound of several footsteps came running up to her bedroom door and it flew open.

“Honey? Are you alri—“

“What happened to the window?” Her father asked, cutting off her mother as he walked over to inspect it. He turned to her and froze. Lila had still been holding onto something when the lights came on in the room. The day Johnathan had gone missing, there was one thing that had never been recovered with his body. Johnathan’s camping backpack was being clasped to Lila’s chest, still covered in snow and caked with dirt and mud. Her father came over and gently took it from Lila with shaking hands. Her mother covered her mouth and tears began to fill her eyes.

“How did you…?” Her father asked, looking at the window and how it had shattered outward.

“The monster brought it. The one Johnathan had been in the woods looking for. It came for me, but it didn’t get me. I pulled Johnathan from it. He’s free now.”

Lila woke Christmas morning to the sound of bells. She got up, still hearing them as she got out of bed and happened to glance out of her new window towards the snow covered woods, gently lit with early dawn. Her brother was standing there, just like he had been right before he had gone into the woods that final time. He was smiling and waving. In that instant, he was gone. Lila never saw her brother’s spirit again, but she knew he was always with her, watching over her and protecting her, because the lich never returned.