My home used to be at the edge of a deep forest. The black trees it was made of united to blanket the sky with their thick, gnarled canopy. The density of the forest made a trial out of entering. Tall, knotty undergrowth clung to the trees under which they reach to the heavens with irregular thorns. At night, the shadows from the trees make seeing a chore, so much so that it’s wiser not to leave the building unless the sun is up.
I lived in an apartment building that was originally a less ostentatious mansion built when gambrel roofs were popular. There were three other tenants, but fluctuation was common. I was the second oldest tenant here, in seniority, besides Andrew and his family, who were the first to rent a room after the house became an apartment building.
The house was old, the floors were warped and the windows were bleary. Stucco always used to crumble off of the walls outside and reveals gray bricks beneath. It was owned by the Walfords, a prosperous Philadelphian family who, my landlord Boris told me, handled their money poorly, and sold the house to him to use as an apartment building. No sooner had they received the money for the house’s purchase than the Walfords lost touch with Boris altogether.
Boris Brokowski was a small Russian fellow; always with him were thick dark glasses and a persistent cough. He was friendly enough, if sickly, but he detested smoke, which would exacerbate his cough to a dizzying degree.
When I applied to rent the apartment, I was glad to know that the rules allowed for my cat, Olive, to live with me. She was about two years old, and was given to me by Andrew’s daughter, whose cat had kittens. The kittens were all given away, and their mother died long before, and Olive is the only remaining cat in the building.
On the side of my house opposite the woods sprawled the rest of the town, bustling increasingly with distance. Our closest neighbor is the large but for the most part neglected Baptist church. We have few visitors here. The town ignores the apartment’s tenants, out of geographical inconvenience if nothing else.
On Thursday, I went to a play in town with another tenant, Clair. We had dinner there, as well, but there was a no-smoking policy enacted in the building, so I forewent my cigarette until later. We returned home at about nine o’clock. It was fall, and we had some time before we became completely used to the darkness of the hour. I walked Clair to her apartment and returned to mine. Olive escaped as soon as I cracked open the door, going out for what I suppose we both presumed would be the rest of the night. I attempted to sleep, but a strange thrill enraptured me and kept me from slumber. I dozed in and out of a very light sleep for a few hours, and at one in the morning, I wondered if I just needed the cigarette I had done without that evening to put me to sleep.
I pulled one out and put it between my lips before walking downstairs. I stepped down two flights of stairs to the basement, where a door to the outside lay on the side of the house, away from the front entrance. I left the door open and the light on, and together they cast elongated shadows upon the yard and along the wood. The cold impaired my feet. I shivered and lit the cigarette and stood at the entrance of the door for a few minutes. Around the corner of the house, the quick-paced footsteps of animals chasing each other resounded. My heart and I nearly jumped when a hideous screech heralded the animals’ commencement of battle. I nearly bounded back into the house, and I wish I had. Instead, I crept around the corner of the house to see what I could. There I saw Olive in combat with a possibly feline animal that I couldn’t, in the gloom, make out in detail. The way it moved and its crackling, unearthly call weighed down my gut with revulsion. Its shadowed face peered over at me, and, discovering that it had been spotted, it dashed into the tall undergrowth of the woods. Olive rocketed into the house in a like manner.
There was something at the end of the driveway. No sooner had I noticed it than exposed itself to what little light there was; it was unmistakably a human form. By the time I realized this, I realized as well that it had been approaching and was very close to me. The thing instilled in me a breed of terror I couldn’t have imagined except in sleep. In panic I tried to burn it with my cigarette. I made an attempt as best as I was willing to make and sprinted back to the basement door, unaware of the effectiveness of my attack. The frost on the grass melted under my comparatively warm, bare feet and I slipped, falling face-first into the cold, wet grass. I was completely disorganized when I fell, and I could feel my heartbeat in my head. I woke up in my bed.
The feeling of entire incident was so dreamlike and was so unpleasant that I left it at that. I justified my assumption with the fact that I had actually fallen asleep, and I must have just dreamt that I woke up and had a cigarette.
Olive had a bloody ear and bloody paws when I looked at her. Andrew knocked on my door on Friday afternoon. He told me that he found me on the ground outside that night after he heard the fight between my cat and the being that had fled into the woods. Obviously it was not a dream, but in my heart I hadn’t really thought so. I stayed home from work on Friday because I woke up with a fever and a cough. Olive was in much the same condition. When I slept, my sickness plagued me with more dreams about the woods. In one of them, I stood entranced in front of the woods. I saw an arm come out from under the black trees, and I saw it grow longer and longer until it grabbed onto my shirt and pull me into the forest with it.
Andrew came to see how well I was doing, and when he saw me in my state, scolded me for having caught a cold.
I implored Andrew not to leave, grasping his coat when he tried; I said I didn’t want to have any more nightmares. I told him about the night before, and about the person who had approached me. My story wasn’t all that fanciful, and Andrew did admit that he’d found me on the ground where I said this all took place. He said he’d stay, but he called his wife first.
My apartment was much too cold. To try and keep my staled spirits up, Andrew cooked dinner. It was a bean stew boiled with stock, and thick slabs of bread with butter and honey; “something”, he said, “for the winter”. I had wrapped myself in a blanket to keep warm, and I was distracted while we ate. I didn’t eat much, and I didn’t talk much. I was much more at ease, however.
By eight, I was in a better state, and he decided to leave. I lost my promising demeanor altogether and begged him to stay and see if the man or the animal would return. He looked perplexed but offered to call the police, he said, “if it bothered me so much.” The police wouldn’t be able to help; the man and the animal were long gone. I explained that to him, and he promised to stay up with me, and go outside at the same time as I did the day before.
He revealed his confusion about why I thought they would return at all, and why I would want to see them again, if they did, if the previous encounter affected me in such a way.
I did the same thing as the night before; I went out at about one o’clock, I smoked, and I was barefoot. Andrew remained inside, looking through the window and casting a shadow of his head onto the yard ahead. I heard rustling in the undergrowth, jumped to attention, and stared through the gloom. Olive calmly but nervously shuffled inside the building, and four or five other cats bounded much more spryly than her away towards the Baptist Church. We waited for another ten minutes.
Andrew suggested that they weren’t going to be there, like he thought, and told me that we both needed to sleep. I was hesitant to sleep after the dreams I’d had since the first encounter only the night before, but Andrew went back inside, and my desire to stay outside dissolved, so I hastily followed him in. My sleep was poxed with nightmares.
When I woke up on Saturday morning, my sheets were in knots and I was sweating. My illness had gotten worse, I slowly realized as I became more generally aware after I got out of bed. Olive was gone. I remembered that she had come in the night before, but not letting her out again. I was surprised that she would have wanted to go outside at all, considering her condition, which was similar to my own.
For the life of me I couldn’t tell what vague thing was happening around there, but I never felt quite the same since the encounter on Thursday night.
Andrew wasn’t home or wasn’t answering. I poked at some breakfast and then tried to get some more sleep. I woke up at noon, feeling no different, so I walked outside. I had nowhere in the world to go, but the woods built in me a terror I couldn’t settle, so I wandered in the opposite direction.
I found myself in the vacant lot outside of the Baptist church. Coarse, dark gravel chafed under my feet, and tiny plants struggled to the surface. I kicked a wooden pole that had been left there from some previous activity. There were voices inside the church, and being alone made me uneasy, so I opened a side-door and walked in. There was a welcoming artificial warmth that surrounded me, and I walked through a door past which I heard the voices.
There was a coterie of worshippers there, four or five. They looked worried before they saw me, but welcomed me in once my presence was clear. Before I could ask what they were gathered for, a woman in a black raincoat noted my my dour disposition. I told them about the man and the animal, that there was something about them that I couldn’t settle with myself, and how Andrew tried to help me.
The group looked unsurprised. A tall man with a bowler and an unlit cigar, nodded his head and revealed that something unnatural had recently happened to all of them. None, I gathered, had an experience nearly as explicit as mine, but each had seen something go into the woods, or come out of it, or heard a strange call in the deepest part of the night. We were all having nightmares.
We discussed the circumstances for hours. Nothing anybody said seemed real enough not to disavow, and everything, except the nightmares, seemed too trivial for us to be getting worked up about. I was, I learned, the only one who had gotten sick after the encounter. The woman in the raincoat said that her grandmother had told her about stirrings in the woods that put you ill-at-ease, and supposed that our plight was likely not a new one. She mentioned something about her grandmother’s occasional mumblings about a black goat of the woods, but that was all she knew, and so she said no more about it.
A short, fat man in a white suit had a more substantial theory, thought it may not have been any more convincing. The woods were teeming, he postulated, with vampires of the ancient myths. His diagnosis of my mysterious illness was grave. The creature that had approached me so closely that I shudder now to recall it had taken my blood, and infected me with the endless disease. He warned me with a concerned countenance that my outlook was grim, reiterating that I must destroy my attacker before it was too late. In respect of time, he was vague, paradoxically so in comparison with his encyclopedic knowledge otherwise. I didn’t believe any of it.
I was commissioned to the task of destroying the thing, despite my only having had one experience with it and no reason to think I’d have another, with little consent on my part. The fat man exposed the idea for me to carry a white cross broken in four pieces in my pockets. The group, no sooner had he mentioned the ritual, obliged that I drink the blood of the woman in the raincoat.
The group seemed to have had it all figured out in the beginning, and I began to feel uneasy again. Their command was too much for me, and I rose from my seat and suggested an exit. The woman’s shoulder was bleeding even when I said that, and she, more sternly, told me to drink. A man with sunglasses for eyes removed a glistening revolver, not in such a way as to conceal it from anyone, as I nauseously and hesitantly lapped the gout of blood distending on her shoulder. The worshippers’ ideas were set, and my hindrance was not a part of them. I was handed the revolver, handle side, and told me to keep it.
They encouraged me to return to the scene of my Thursday encounter that night and wait until the man and the animal returned. I half-heartedly agreed, fearing the group’s mettle, and made a grateful but unresolved exit.
I returned to my apartment with the revolver and the white cross. Olive hadn’t returned home. My apartment was cold and empty. I place the gun on my kitchen table and sat. The time then was nearly nine o’clock. I didn’t eat anything.
I waited there an hour, drumming my fingers on the thin wooden table perhaps the entire time. The only time I moved from the spot during that time was a brief trip to the sink for a tall glass of water, which I thought would calm my racing nerves. There were no clean glasses, so I chose the most serviceable one I could and filled it with unusually sparkling water from the sink. After a few sips, I realized the futility in it and ruffled through my jacket for my cigarettes as an alternative, eschewing the building’s policy on smoking indoors. I unsheathed a cigarette bent almost to breakage and had a drag or two before putting it out and cracking it in half.
At about ten o’clock, I rose from my seat and paced about the kitchen. I looked back at the table, noticing the revolver’s position pointed directly at me.
I couldn’t understand my nervousness or why I thought the man and the animal would return. I couldn’t fit it through my head that situations like that did not occur ritually. But I had been affected in a way suggesting something else. The group I’d run into at the church must have thought so too, or I wouldn’t have been sent to stop what we’d assumed was going to continue.
Olive never came back. I wanted to be upset about it, but I could only focus on what I was being made to do. If anything were different, or perhaps the same, I would have been crushed by her disappearance. She had gotten sick and vanished. I had gotten sick as well, with a fever whose severity I preferred not to confirm. By one o’clock, I was as unready as ever, so I put my jacket on and reached for the revolver and held it tensely in my fist. I felt for the pieces of the white cross, took my shoes off, and left my apartment with a cigarette in my lips.
Boris, not usually awake at that time, had been approaching my room. He stopped me in the hall as I left. He stopped me and asked me if I had been smoking in my room. The house was old, I justified, and such strong odors as smoke can easily be noticed. Without wasting much time, I told him I had to go. He followed me, asking me what was so important that I couldn’t follow his rules. Feeling cornered, I raised my weapon and bid him leave me alone. He scampered off in the opposite direction and I walked resolutely down to the exit I’d made a ritual out of passing through. Everything, down to the temperature, was the same, yet again. My encounter with Boris had knocked some sense into me. I didn’t deserve any of what was happening. The worshippers in the church had forced this responsibility on me, and there was no reason for me to think that anything was going to happen that night.
The bushes rustled. My previous demeanor melted away to my former uneasy state and I nearly dropped my weapon and my cigarette. I stomped around the corner, holding the revolver more tightly than ever, and found, with conflicting surprise and expectation, the little monster that had taken Olive. I only barely saw it, but it certainly saw me. It cried bizarrely in fear and leaped back towards the woods. Before it could disappear once more I released a cartridge from the revolver, hitting the thing in the leg. The feeling that its subsequent shriek evoked in me almost swayed me to bound in the opposite direction, but I shot it again, this time, due to its limited mobility, in the torso. I felt I’d given it a mortal wound as it crawled with all its strength back into the undergrowth.
Down at the driveway, the man, exactly as before, approached me. With pristine repulsion I approached him in the same manner.. Once he was close enough for me to make out his details, I heatedly blew my remaining four cartridges into his chest, despite his having buckled to the ground after the first. Almost all the lights in the apartment, I saw through the windows, had been turned on by that time.
He rose from the ground. There was nothing left to do but scream. The nightmare of the first encounter came back to me all at once, and I finally took to the idea of running. I ran almost faster than I could, away from the apartment along the edge of the woods. I looked backwards. The clamor of the gunshots or my screams had not brought anyone outside to see what was going on; the man I’d shot, the only one there, was running at my very speed. I looked backwards for too long, and slipped again. This time, though, I caught myself and scrambled to my feet. A few yards away – I had never gone this far in that direction, and the forest was beginning to close in on the other side – was a large black rock rising out of the ground. I was nearly dead with exhaustion, but I had no choice. I would wait there and use the white cross that had only just come to mind against him.
I approached the rock, preparing to jump. As I reached it, it began to move. I saw, close to the ground, the head and forelegs of a black goat. What I’d thought was the rock was the distended and pregnant body of the fresh nightmare. The surprise brought my running to a halt; I slipped on the grass, falling next to the thing as the man enclosed the area. I didn’t move, but screamed.
I woke up. The scream echoed recently in my head. My bed wasn’t under me, and my roof wasn’t above me. I was in a clearing surrounded by woods on all sides. I rose from the damp autumn ground, still sick. It took me only a moment to realize how far into the woods I had woken up. On no side could I see the way out. I walked for hours and hours looking for a way out, but I never found one. I’m still wandering through the woods, hoping to leave one day.