PERSONAL PROSE: WOLFNECK

Everyone knew Wolfneck woods had monsters.

Whitney said werewolves, of the low groaning and whining of the trees. Roolf said ghosts, of the passing of shadows along the path. Haylan said ghosts don’t exist, stupid.

In the daylight, Niko could make sense of only a few reasons to be scared in the Hollow; its steep cliffsides, its low-hanging cobwebs--and a handful of ominous, elementary-school-circulated rumours

The Hollow was a deep scoop in the forest earth, with skyward twisting cedars. In the early mornings, the sun filtered and blinked in through their branches, hazy like an old photo, and crackling with the gust of mountain air. Roolf had thrown his hands up in the air in dismay; "why can't we ever a have a normal summer?"

You know better, about those cedars, that cold breeze. It is not harmless. 

The walkie-talkie is loose in his grip when he stops, stares, feels familiar pit in his stomach--as though a richter moves somewhere under his feet. He stills, listens.

A flash of brown hair in his peripherals, and Natalie casts a reassuring smile over her shoulder from up ahead, tip-tapping a jagged branch along the forest floor. 

The little cross of rose-gold bounces on flannel fabric as she skips her steps; “I’m safe with this,” she had said once, held it out proud in her palm.

He remembers this moment—this forest, and this day. It's fuzzy on the edges. It hinges on his subconscious like crawlspace cobweb.

He remembers, now, how Roolf’s jacket belongs to his father, and how his fingers barely pass the sleeve holes as he balances, precise, and steps along the decaying stones of an old well. A curly mop of brown hair and a fading baseball hat—he could be real.

“This is where I heard it.” Niko hears himself say. He turns his gaze around the clearing, empty of motion besides the milling about of their exploration, the twitch of the wind in the leaves.

“....Maybe because the stalker man lives down there,” Natalie suggests earnestly.

Niko smiles, thumbs the buttons of the walkie talkie, and turns an incredulous eye to her.

“There’s no stalker man.

She shrugs, tapping at the edge of the well with her Gandalf stick.

Attie told me so.

Roolf pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, scoffs as he drops down onto the safety of the forest floor.

“Your brother’s such a liar, Nat. No one can live in a well.

Niko is still staring down at the walkie.

“...forest is where he lives,”

He feels the conversation around him pass into fog.

“...you don’t know that”

He feels like his ears are ringing shrilly.

right, Niko?

Eyes snap up, Niko looks past Roolf’s shoulder, a buzzing tinnitus clinging to the air, around his peripherals.

Listen. Listen, something whispers in the low, garbled tones of a mixed signal, in the depths of his  clutched walkie. It reminds him of number stations chiming a forgotten cipher, or the last transmission from an aircraft’s black box. The voice layers staccato and distorted:




F̭͖̰͖̹̮͖̫̖̩̰̱̯ͣ͒̅̒̄͛̈̓͜͢I̵̵̛̘̦̺̐̔̍̆̇́͝ͅN̴̯͖̖̗̮̙̂ͭ̓͗ͧ̀͑̏̽͒̂́͠ͅD̶̦̪͚̝̟͈̘̩͔̮͙̘͎̣̆̐̏ͫͯ́̎̋̐̅̓̈̀̆ͤͩ̚͟͟ͅͅͅ ̶̋̄̎͆̂̀ͮ́́͛͌͆͆̿̾ͮͤ҉͎̗͔̗͈̙̯̹̺͔͟Ḿ̡̛̘̪̣̼̩̲̊́ͪ̄͂͒ͤ̐̉̆̅̓ͮ̊͂́͘͘Ḙ̷̴̵̱̫̲͖̫̹͌ͫ̐̿̿͑͟͠



His heartbeat stumbles, nosedives into frantic, and somewhere in the trees, a flock of birds scatter to the wind. He breathes in, careful and quiet. Natalie and Roolf are still now, facing away--facing the mouth of the forest as the crows flee in a black, crying mass. The forest is still, the air is still.

Niko brandishes the old walkie like a rosary, moves carefully toward the crumbled structure of the well. His breath hangs in his lungs, and huffs out in a frigid vapour. And he waits, trembling. 

And after a moment, it’s just a well. He wants it, more than anything, to be just a well. Just another old thing in the woods.

“Niko?” Natalie asks again, distant. 

You know how this one goes., you know the script.

He blinks, and the night is pitch black, hostile, quiet as the grave. You know this part, you do. His breath comes out from between chattering teeth. He feels the pins and needles beginning in his fingers. 

Pinprick gaze flashes left and right, finding himself very much alone. Above, no more birds.

Roolf is gone, Natalie is gone.

The stone is cold under his fingers, and he notices, slowly, how he’s been leaning over the mouth of the well. For how long? His eyes close, eyebrows pinched down in concentration. 

Fingernails dig at skin; Where are you, now? Where are the crickets? How did you get here? If you’re dreaming, you should catch yourself before it’s too late.

His eyes snap open. Roolf’s bicycle rests still against a tree, an austere fixture of the forest. It creaks, bending metal, front wheel spinning in open air; in his blindspot, he swears he senses movement, feels it like a gust of wind. Something hits the bottom of the well with a wet thud, and he jolts away--eyes following into its void depths, breath dropping out of his chest like an anvil. 

Nothing but darkness, thick as smoke, looks back at him. He doesn't want to look anymore.

The walkie in his hand gurgles an angry static, and the static digs and scratches like earwigs until it fills his head with a dull, aching pulse. It hisses, again, frequency dipping in and out of low shrieks until it quiets, pulsing, listening. 

A short inhale, exhale.

Another breath, rattling and garbled, answers next to his ear.



Ỉ̬̭̰͔͔̥̦͎͚͐̂̍̀͆̒ͅ'̪̗̫̖̱̞͍̖͉̩͑̿̌̆̾̒̀͘͘m̷̧͔͕̤͗̎̀̇͗̾͆͋͟ ṟ͕̫͔̓̂̓̒̓͡ͅį̝͎̪̻̯̩̉̓̈́̎̽̚͡g̘̪͚̦̣̓́̈́̾͗̇̀h̰͚̞͕͓̩̰̦̃͗̒͐̇̃͞͞t̷̼̭̤̜̘͎͒̓̌́́̇̾͋͒͘ ĥ̛̰̥̫̟͎̙̩͋̍͆̀̄̕̚ę̮̖̥͇̟̞́̿̈̎́͢͢͞͡͡r̴̡̩͖̪̓̈̐́́̔̒̾͟͟͟ͅͅͅe͇̠̥̩̝͚̝̺̋̾͊̔̌̉̽̉̚͝,



Like fingers jammed to the back of the throat, like missing a step on the stairs, like ice water. A hundred hands, pulling, grabbing, clawingpeelingtearing. And when he chokes, he tastes feathers, and dirt, and rot. Rot, rot, rot.





I'̽ͣͨͪ͌̽̆̄̿̾̀ͤ̒҉̸̬̤̘̞̻̦̥͙͙̭̝̯̬̥̙M̴̟͙̹̘̟̫͖̬͎̒̀̒ͤͯ̊̒ͤ͗ͨ͑ͥ̈́̂̊̇̔̋̍̀́͟͠ ̢̢̱̯͓̩͔̰̯̳̮͎̬̊͒ͤ̋ͫͬ͂ͭ̐̇ͯ̚͘͠R̶̨̢̬̮͍̖̠̜̎̓̒̋͂̀I̷̵̤͔̥̹̟͕̪͙̲̘̯̬͚͚̟͇͎̝ͥͩ̃̿G̷̴̨͈̹̘̬̺͕̜̯̳̤̭̘ͩͤ̐ͯͤ̆̈ͬͮ̐̄̂̅̓H̷͆̒͆̄̓ͨ̑́͢҉̵̷̹͔̪͉͉̹̼͉T̶̡̤̦͖̹͓̻̦̱͙̫̻͇̮̱͙̣͍͚̿̇ͦ̓ͮ̅ͨ̒ͪ́͐̉ͩͥ͝ͅ ̨̡̮̯͇͖̭͖͎̪͚͍̖͖̂̀͐̆H̵̸̢̹̠̦̬̲̣̖̹̬̪͓̦̩̝̱̤͔̟ͪ̑̎͊ͧ̈͂̐ͪ̏̏̉̎̂ͤ̋̆E̿̿̐ͫ҉͓̬͎̀R̴̝̳̙̦̜̘̯̻̲̟͚̻̹̣̝̯̱͒̒̇̽͟͠Ȩ̵̧̞̳̰̹͓̥͎͙͖̪̻̦͇̫̤̰̔ͮͪ̈̃̆ͪ̿ͫ̀͗̈ͦ

Thump. His violent, full-body jolt sends him into a solid surface. Niko groans, squinting in the  fading daylight-- and at the offending window he’s bumped his skull on.

Bus, he reminds himself. Bus, dumbass. Skin of his palms whiten under short fingernails-- the crescent moons are dark blue; that’s real, he thinks, and you’re safe.

He notices, then, that he’s gained the brief audience of a woman sitting several rows up, dainty shoulders giving a huff of a sigh as she returns to her paperback. Niko watches her for a moment as he catches his breath, thumbs the funeral program in his pocket, and allows stillness to fold over his nerves.

The radio system dimly buzzes out a distant imitation of Pat Benatar's "We Belong". 

He’s slept through most of the trip--fortunate, considering the drive into town was mostly trees. They skate by in a blur under the condensation on the window, pines looming austere like rows of teeth.

Niko’s fingernails drum out the Pat Benatar chorus on the frigid windowsill, the chilled and withering hand of recent rainfall slipping in through the cracks. Mountain air could be very dry, but mostly, it was cold.

The bus rumbles low and tired as it crosses the threshold of fog, the first of sleepy rooftops passing him by, and then gone as ghosts. Wolfneck had felt taller once. He imagines it still would if he were still 4 feet tall.

The town passes, denser, peering at him in shop windows, humming in the gravelly roads under the tires. Few signs of life greet him, aside from the usual buzz radiating from Ralph’s, surrounded by its early bar flies.

Wolfneck was, and seemingly continued to be a town of one church, one bowling alley, and three bars-- a place to get gas on your roadtrip, but not much else.

Unfortunately for him, this smudge on the map was his destination.

The silhouette of the bus station comes into view-- a disused, dim thing with no operator; it’s hard to believe anyone’s used it since he watched it disappear in red taillights years ago. 

Yet it exists, a stubborn fixture, along with the rest of this place, like it has anything important to be doing. He tries to stomach it, again, and again, every night. And here it is, with the nerve to blink at him owlishly in the dusk.

The bus halts— the illusion that he might pass the town by shattering in a dashed moment.

He becomes less convinced the bus driver had ever been awake during their trip as he passes the stocky, glazy man on his way off. As his feet touch asphalt, he feels exposed, with only a dufflebag and a suitcase to his name, like a hitchhiker in a strange place. Most of his belongings remain at Aunt Rita’s house--his grandmother had promised to have it sent up to Wolfneck in the next week. 

But then again, maybe it was a little easier-- to pretend he wasn’t staying.

The sound of papers rustling halts his mindless pace, and Niko looks up. As the bus chugs back onto the road, a girl with prim, wavy brown hair comes into view, arranging pages on a bulletin board across the empty street. With one streetlight between them, the moment is infinitely lonelier.

There’s a delicate care with which the flowers are pinned, the stuffed animals arranged, rearranged. He watches, forgets where he is for a moment. She isn’t looking at him, he might as well be a ghost. 

--And there’s a name pressing hard on his tongue, and then it’s more like a choking sensation. The papers full of faces are collected in one arm, and she’s gone in a flash of brown hair, down a path by the edge of the woods. 

He says her name out loud, but it’s audible to neither of them.

She’s long gone by the time he crosses the road. To examine, with vague dread, the missing person’s board.  A particularly sad teddy bear, scraggly, rain-heavy, pinned with a nail in the shoulder to decaying wood.

His gaze drops, scans the crowd staring back at him from ragged, rain crinkled pages. He had called them milk-carton kids once—he hadn't known any better.

One poster, newer, less weathered than the rest, read the name MADISON GRAY in bold tall letters, with a picture of a girl with black hair and dark-lined eyes. Below, the usual fare-- phone numbers, last known whereabouts, reward offerings.

He could laugh, a bitterness growing in his throat. Wolfneck had a habit of combining things-- the bowling alley and the pizza place, the taxidermist and the convenience store-- a missing board and a memorial.

The mountain of photos and flowers and trinkets at his feet have been meticulously curated, and something wrenches in his chest. Standing here, undoubtedly in its guts, it remains surreal that Wolfneck had gone on existing at all.

His fingertips brush the posters; it is merely layered paper, damp and ripped, faces overexposed, bleached out by countless storms. He wonders if the ink will come away with his fingerprints.

                           “ Baby, bring these by the post office, I’m meeting the sheriff, later. ”  He’s numb when he nods. The weight of the papers in his hands is immense, familiar.

Niko blinks, fingernails biting into his wrist. A sharp inhale as he comes back to the surface, and the rustle of the trees grounds him in place. Stillness, listening to his breath stagger in and out. The moment passes, Niko’s fingers uncurl.

He continues with new intent, passes the board, the corner store, the bowling alley, turns down a winding, upward road. 

Whitaker, dead end ahead, the gnarled sign reads.

He glances at his phone, once. 

“Are you going to call your mother?”  Irene, the therapist, asked, two hours ago. He pockets it again.

Niko makes his way uphill, passes cottages sunken into the backdrop of an ambiguously hostile treeline, and the old construction lot. It looked like no one had ever bothered finishing that duplex. 

When the house at the end of the road comes into view, his mind struggles to compensate for its quiet, unassuming silhouette, shaded in the rustling pines. One light is on in the kitchen, faintly peeking out through gingham curtains. He slows his step, keeps an eye on the house in case it chooses to lurch at him, and swallow him whole.

He doesn’t remember getting this close, hand still hovering where it had knocked on the peeling red door. 

His mother, peering at him behind her spectacles, looks the same, and he feels like a vampire at his own doorstep. Her eyes, maybe more tired, sketched around by eight years, dark hair in a tight bun with a few greys poking out in sharp streaks. A feeling of disconnect rushes him like a freight train, nameless and vague.

She sets down a glass on the side table in exchange for a hand, hovering in the open air at her side, hesitant. A smile, sad and nostalgic in equal measures touches her laugh lines, and his feet feel stuck on the welcome mat.

“Hi, honey.”

He thinks quietly on sinking, sludge-like, through the porch steps and into the garden dirt, never to be seen again.

Look at you, her eyes say. Look at how you changed.

Look at how I’ve changed, his thoughts echo numbly, as he struggles with what to do with his hands. He grips the strap of his dufflebag tighter.

“Hey, mom.” An uneasy shift of his shoes, and his bitterness loses a bit of footing. She mirrors him uncertainly, and he nearly flinches back as she reaches out, fussing with hair bleached and dark roots un-curated.

It’s a quiet sort of sternness in her eyebrows, but she opts to slowly lower her hands. They fidget and flutter in his peripherals, surely looking to adjust his collar and smooth down wayward threads—but ultimately settle at her sides as she makes room in the small foyer.

He breathes in. He forgets to let it go for a long moment as he finally walks in. 

Her slippers shuffling on the wooden floor are a very specific kind of memory.

“...I’m... so sorry, about Aunt Rita,” she continues, taking them through the small corridor after his shoes had been kicked aside. He’d been hearing that all day since the service, and the exhaustion of it all sinks bone-deep. He thinks he could sleep for days, years, passing winters in a cave somewhere.

Yeah... me too.” Jaw feels locked and words come out stiff. He shoulders his bag, focuses intently on his shoes.

The ribs of the house creak and groan around him, and they whisper, like a greeting. Mom hadn’t done much with the decor-- the panelling originating from some time in the 70’s, old picture frames and antiques hauled out of garage sales.

Heavy footsteps and claws skitter across the floor, and Niko feels a bit of weight drop away from his chest.

Gordon, eleven year old mountain of fur, trundles up in delay, quick to rescue him from the staticy tenseness building in the line of his shoulders. Niko drops, bringing the dog into his arms, smiling secretly against the sheepdog’s mess of hair.

“Hey, Gordon.”

For a moment, he forgets where he is.

“I’m sure he missed you.” His mother smiles.

                                                                      “You can’t take him, honey. Aunt Rita’s allergic.”

He lets the dog go.

“Everything...should be where you left it,” she continues carefully, stopping at the end of the hall and pulling her shrug closer around her shoulders.

Niko slowly stands, at a loss instantly for what to do with his hands again. Instead, he takes in the house, like one might size up a mountain lion. He feels too small and too tall all at once, like limbs are getting caught in doorways, like he could fall through the floorboards.

Only one closed door exists in the hallway, with a solitary plastic butterfly sticker whimsical and lonely in the middle. Making eye contact with it feels like a sucker punch, and he catches himself releasing a held breath when he passes.

                                                    Crack in the door, a smile in her eyes as she latches onto his sleeve: “Niko! Niko, be on my radio show.”

Coldness through his fingertips, and he pockets them, ducking his head as he follows his mother further down the corridor.

“The drive was alright?”

He shrugs out his reverie, sets his bag down against the wall, gaze hanging on the fixtures of his room, untouched like a museum display.

He idly turns an old dinosaur figure on his dresser with his fingers.

“Long.”

You aren’t being fair. You aren’t.

She hovers, unsure, flighty as a moth, fingers tapping at the doorframe. For a long moment, she is silent, eyebrows pinching, fingers fidgeting at the fabric of her clothing. He is ruthlessly silently, waiting for her to continue.

“...Did you get the cards?” They’re both looking at her wringing hands.

The...” A long pause follows, where he thinks on the unopened envelopes passed from Rita’s hands to his. At some point, he had given up staring them down, and slid them off his desk into the garbage bin.

You didn’t reply, so I thought…”

He can feel the response coming up out of him like rising bile, the inability to be kind. To be or feel anything at this moment but deeply, deeply tired in his bones.

“I got them.”

The response seems to startle her into silence, and she offers a strained smile, stepping away from the door frame with a sweep of her evening robe. Niko watches her, and bites down on his tongue, bites down on an apology.

“...Well, anyway,” the smile remains. “You know where everything is…Welcome home.“ And she’s gone, leaving him to regret in solitude. There’s only a short moment of quiet, before Gordon noses his way in the doorway, tail wagging lazily as he invites himself up onto the old bed.

“...Yeah, I know,” he says, holding the dogs face in two hands.

It’s still barely 8 pm, but the sheepdog’s position looks agreeable, so he sheds the day-old grime, leaves his baggage untouched as he drops onto the bed next to the wooly mammoth, lets a long, depleted sigh leave his frame. Remorse makes an uncomfortable pit in his ribs until eyelids drop down, threatening sleep, lulled easily by exhaustion and the stick-on stars covering the ceiling. The wind picks up outside, branches of the old oak in the yard tapping a familiar rhythm on the glass.

And from somewhere below, a static crackle.

His breath quickens, sleep twisting from his grasp in an instant. Whispering, incomprehensive, a chatter over a far off signal;

.

Ì̴̼͈̘̤͍̟̪͔̈̓̆̽̔̚’̛͉͚̻̲͇͈̾͂̍̄͢ r̦͕̲͇͍͚̗͛̀͋͐͛̉͋̓͢i̶̡̧̗̘̹̲̥͂͋̿͒͑͋̄̏̃…̡̢̹͈̘͎̱̼̜̻͌͛̌̿̉̎͝ h̛̫̠̳͉̬̫͉̤̿̿̏̒̿̎̐



He blinks hard in the darkness, barely daring to breathe. Paralysis clings to him, and childishly, he feels safe on the topside of the bed. Beside him, Gordon doesn’t stir.

Knuckles whiten in the blankets as he lurches upright, scans the darkness.

And again, shorter and louder;

.

F I ND M E’̨͔͍̞͉̲̝̗͐̉͗͛̓̾́̽̚