The Woods at Night by Stetson Ray
“She slept during the day and prowled the woods at night.”
The voice was close, but muffled. Tom was trapped in darkness, and he couldn’t see where the words were coming from.
“People said Miss Marleen was crazy, and some people said she was a witch. She lived in a shack she built herself, and she stayed in these woods for most of her life.”
Tom tried to sit up and realized he was trapped inside a sleeping bag. He fumbled for the zipper in the dark.
“Miss Marleen survived on what she could forage, and she trapped rabbits and squirrels when she needed meat. She never left these woods, and if she caught anyone trespassing on her land, she’d chase ‘em out.”
The air inside the sleeping bag was hot and stale. Tom felt like he might suffocate if he didn’t free himself soon.
“Marleen was only about five feet tall. She was scrawny and pale and she didn’t wear shoes. She didn’t bathe and never cut her hair. I caught a glimpse of her one time when I was a kid and I swear her hair was so long it touched the ground.”
Tom found and yanked the zipper and forced his head out of the sleeping bag. The frigid air made him cough. There was a campfire burning near his feet, but it wasn’t putting off much heat. Leafless trees reached up toward a star spotted sky. Tom was in the woods, but he wasn’t sure why. He’d never been more confused in his entire life.
“But Marleen was beautiful once,” the blurry figure sitting beside Tom said. “When she was young, her family died in a fire, and she was the only one who survived. Since she was poor and her family was gone, she married a wealthy older man so she’d have somewhere to live. She thought he was a good man. She was wrong.”
After a few seconds of blinking and eye rubbing, Tom was finally able to see the storyteller’s face. On a log next to Tom, sat a man named Henry.
Henry had been Tom’s best friend during high school, but Tom couldn’t remember the last time they had spent time together. Regardless, just knowing that Henry was there beside him (wherever they were) calmed Tom down immediately.
“Marleen’s husband treated her terribly,” Henry said. “He was cruel to her, and each time she stood up for herself, he’d treat her a little worse from then on. She tried to leave one night, but he caught her and locked her in the cellar beneath the house. He kept Marleen down there for years, and he’d only come down a couple times a week to feed her—and do who knows what to her.”
Tom tried to ask Henry where they were, but there was a dried out sponge where his voice-box should’ve been.
“Marleen lost her mind down there in that cellar,” Henry continued. “She screamed for help for so long it messed her vocal cords up and they stopped working right. I’ve heard people say that when she screamed, she sounded like a dying animal.”
Henry looked up into the sky and did his best to imitate Marleen’s scream.
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
Goosebumps rippled across Tom’s skin. He had never heard anyone make a sound so horrid, or so heartbreaking.
“One day Marleen decided she couldn’t take it anymore, so she came up with a way to get out. She pulled out her long hair and strung it across the top of the cellar stairs like a rope, and when her husband came to feed her, he tripped and fell down the stairs. Before he could get up, Marleen pounced on him and crushed his head with a brick she’d pried loose from the wall.”
There was another person sitting on the other side of the campfire, but Tom couldn’t tell who they were. He suddenly wondered if his wife knew where he was, then realized he couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. He couldn’t remember anything.
“When Marleen got out of the basement she called the police, but she couldn’t speak—her throat was too messed up. The cops traced the call and when they got there they offered her help, but she panicked at the sight of so many people and fled into these very woods.”
Something about Henry’s story didn’t make sense, but Tom couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Marleen lived out here for over thirty years, and most people were happy to leave her alone. Then one day some lame-brain with too much money decided to develop Marleen’s woods and sell it. You see, Marleen didn’t own the land she’d been squatting on, so she didn’t have any legal claim to it. Eventually the police came out here to make her leave, and they had to drag her away kicking and…screaming.”
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
Tom’s soul threatened to leap from his throat. Henry had always been a great storyteller. If Tom wasn’t so cold and confused, he would have enjoyed listening to him. He’d probably heard every scary story that Henry had ever told, and he knew plenty about the local recluse known as Miss Marleen, but he had never heard anyone work such a sound into the tale before.
“I heard she attacked one of the cops with a rock when they came to make her leave—tried to sink it in his face like she’d done to her husband—but I don’t know if that part is true.” Henry began to talk faster as he neared the end of the story. “Her deceased husband’s house was gone by then—it burnt down at some point—so the cops planned on taking Marleen to a homeless shelter, but before they could get there she started acting so wild they decided to take her to the county jail. They washed the leaves and dirt out of her hair and locked her in a cell and gave her something to eat. But she wouldn’t calm down. She screamed and carried on halfway through the night.”
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
Every time Henry made the noise, it seemed louder than before—and closer.
“Hearing Marleen scream like that almost drove the guards crazy, so they were relieved when she finally quieted down. But the next morning when they brought Marleen her breakfast, they found out why she’d stopped screaming.”
The wheels in Tom’s mind were turning at last, and he realized why the story Henry was telling didn’t make sense. Developers had bulldozed the forest where Marleen had lived—he was sure of that—so how could they be camping in Marleen’s woods like Henry said they were?
“Marleen had hung herself from the top bunk of her bed. She pulled her hair out and used it to make a rope, just like before. But before she hung herself, she chewed one of her wrists open and used her own blood to write a message on the wall.”
Tom became aware of a few important facts. Henry was dead and had been for years. The forest where Marleen lived had been teeming with wildlife, and Henry went into the woods by himself early one morning to hunt the land before the developers cut the trees and drove away the animals.
He never came back out.
When they found his body, everyone assumed he had fallen out of his tree stand. His funeral was closed-casket. Henry landed on his head, and the damage to his face was too significant to repair.
Tom finally recognized the person who was sitting on the other side of the fire. His wife was staring into the flames with a glum expression on her face. Her presence terrified him more than the company of a hundred dead friends ever could.
A deep sadness in his eyes, Henry leaned down as though he were preparing to whisper a secret into Tom’s ear, then shouted what Marleen had written on the wall of her cell with such force that Tom thought his ear drums would burst.
GOING BACK!
STAY OUT!
Tom jerked awake, his heart racing. The window beside his bed was open, and cold air was blowing into the room. He leapt to his feet and closed the window, then quickly returned to bed and buried himself beneath the covers. He replayed the morbid dream in his mind and wondered what had caused him to have such a strange vision.
Did he have food poisoning?
Had he developed a fever in the night?
He and his wife had bought a new bed to go along with their new house, so maybe that was it—just a stiff new bed. Or had the stress of crawling under a thirty-year mortgage caused him to have an anxiety induced hallucination?
He wasn’t sure, but he knew the story Henry had told in the dream was true. Potential land buyers had been wary to build houses where Marleen had lived—especially after she killed herself the night they made her leave. That’s why the developers had sold Tom and his wife the land where they had later built their home for practically nothing. The developers hoped that once the first home was finished, people would be more inclined to buy property, but so far, Tom and his wife were the only takers—the only people living in Marleen’s woods.
At first, the thought of living so close to where Henry died bothered Tom, but when he found out what they wanted for the piece of land, his worries had melted away. The price was too good to pass up, and he decided he could live with it, but now he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but he felt as though he’d just encountered one.
Or two.
Tom could still hear the terrible screech Henry had made, clear as anything. So clear in fact, he wasn’t so sure it was in his head anymore.
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
His wife would probably make fun of him for the next twenty years for waking her up over a bad dream, but he had to do it. The nightmare was too real, and the feeling or terror was not fading like it was supposed to.
“Hey, honey?” Tom nudged the sleeping figure beside him, but she did not stir. “Honey?” he said louder. She didn’t move, so he put his hand on her shoulder. “Honey, you’re freezing!”
He rolled her over and the air rushed from his lungs. Her head was crushed, a large rock embedded in the crater where her beautiful face had once been.
From the hallway outside his room, he heard the sound of footsteps coming, bare feet pounding against the hardwood floor. Louder than the footsteps was a noise more horrid and heartbreaking than anything Tom had ever heard.
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!
EEE-OOO-WWW-AAA-HHH!