The misty woods were silent, dark, and deep.
Not in any passively morbid Frostian way, mind you. The woods beyond the decrepit Gutterman place -- just on the other side of the long-neglected graveyard, where fog-shrouded forgotten souls dreamt their cold dreams -- weren't the sort of woods to bend themselves to a poet's metaphor. No, these woods were far too crafty and wild for that, positively reeking of whispered fears and hoary, unkempt secrets.
And though deep they most certainly were, they weren't _totally_ silent or dark.
True, no cricket's chirp stirred the chill night air so that a foolishly optimistic visitor might declare the scene "quaint"... And true, the grim craggy trees seemed to stand sentinel between the listing graves and a sea of deeper night beneath the baleful cloudswept harvest moon... But every so often, a wayward observer might catch a glimpse of dancing flames far, far distant, yet somehow not far enough.
And, of course, there was the occasional cackle...
Oh! That cackle.
The sudden, silence-shattering sort.
One of those sounds that might wrench the attention of a lone, late-night reader away from the retreat of her imagination; leaving her puzzled, possessed by an uncontrollable shudder, without knowing why.
The sort of sound that nudges the sleeping; causing them to toss, mumble and frown before slipping back into restless rest.
A sort of sound that would certainly stop a passerby mid-step, prompting him to search out its source. But that passerby would never find satisfaction here. He _might_ persuade himself the cackle came from one of the black and ragged birds perched and watching from the twisted boughs.
He would surely have hurried along. But, if pressed, he would have had to admit - that bird didn't make _that_ sound.
A weedy gravel path crawled its way down the hillside from the sagging back porch of the manor, slipping sinuously into the foggy sea that curled about the bone-white markers of cemetery below. Standing there on the protesting timbers before the loosely-hanging back door, the visitor could feel the house's stale warm air on the back of her neck like the fetid breath of a great crouching beast.
She took one hesitant step down to the path, then froze. An angry black cloud obscured the face of the gibbous pumpkin moon, plunging the hillside into impenetrable gloom for a short eternity. She waited. There was urgency here, certainly, but still time enough.
A twig snapped somewhere in the darkness -- a night creature out and about on business of its own, perhaps. The visitor smiled nervously. No doubt the hairy crawler would find her reluctance to wander through its stygian world mystifying, if not amusing.
The cloud moved on. The visitor's deep breath became a startled gasp as an owl hooted to welcome back the orange light. That, and an unexpected creak from the house behind her, finally urged her on her way.
She reached the base of the hill, the low fog eagerly wrapping itself about her calves. The wrought iron cemetery gate, ornate figures of obscure and disturbing visage clinging to its archway, hung ajar in dubious welcome. The visitor reluctantly accepted, and stepped through.
The path had vanished beneath the chill swirling shroud. The woman kept her way by following the widest gap between the mossy graves jutting up all around her like the jagged, rotting teeth of some great antediluvian skull.
The pungent grave loam was full of stealthy rustlings. Suddenly, she felt her shoe scraped by a skeletal finger hidden in the mists below. Frozen with horror, she felt the bony digit inching its way rapidly up her leg with a perversely delicate touch. The scream that rose in her throat would have surely left her mute had fear's icy grip allowed her to scream at all.
Then the "finger" crawled up past her mist-shrouded knee, revealing itself to be nothing more than a chitinous glossy-black millipede. She struck it aside in disgust.
And then she was at the far gate, the misty woods looming ominously before her. The path, overgrown with wise disuse, ran through the gate and disappeared into their murky depths. The trees seemed to leer down at her with knotty, geriatric faces, their arthritic limbs creaking restlessly in the windless night. Black birds perched here and there in their midst, great ravens that watched her intently with a malevolent and preternatural intelligence.
And somewhere deep in the cobwebbed forest ahead, flames danced and flickered between the trees like mad, capering goblins.
Her trembling hand reached out to open the gate, which responded with a horrified *SHRIEK!* of rusted hinges. With a final nervous glance at the watching birds overhead, she strode forward into the woods' dark embrace.
*****
In the meadow beside the wood, where once, not so long ago, a brave farmer had pastured his horses, until the morning he found his prize mare dead against the far fence, her eyes open and wild, her lips pulled back in a soundless scream, someone had been gathering mushrooms.
Not the tasty, buff-colored agaricus compestrous, with its beigy-brown gills and meaty crown; nor even the Prize of Autumn, the noble coprinus comadus, with its creamy white phallic shaft all beshagged like an old man's beard, its white gills liquifying to black ink as it matured. No...not even the tasty boletus edulus, with its spongy gills, nor the chanterel.
No. Someone was seeking out the Amanita muscaria. The lovely parisol top so brightly yellow, flecked with spots of white that made it look like nothing so much as a flat yellow pretzel, its delicate veil ringing the stem below the white gills. And her sister, Verna, with her pristine white cap and lovely veil. Someone had cut them from their beds, leaving their natal cups behind like broken eggshells. Someone had spirited them away, knowing of their deadly powers. Their power to kill with a kiss.
Someone needed poison.
The scarecrow knew full well who'd been about this grim harvest, of course. Little escaped its notice as it stood sentinel over its sea of blasted corn in the field by the meadow, hanging there in rustic crucifixion.
But it was content to keep its own council for now. It simply watched as it had always watched, a wicked toothy grin eternally frozen on its remarkably fresh pumpkin head.
And when the faraway fire flared intensely, a wayward flicker sometimes sliced between the barren branches of the wood. It flashed across that pumpkin face; sharp white light rebounding inside the hollow head, illuminating from within. And its empty, staring eyes glowed pale and clammy. Watching.
Watching the field and the meadow. Watching the wood. And watching the woman who walked there.
With painstaking care, she chose her steps. She struggled in vain to pierce the damp blackness, to look in every direction at once. Her shoulders ached with tension. Her skin seemed to tight for her body, as if it were pricked by each tiny rustle, each glimmer of some wet movement in the dark.
Already exhausted, she leaned her hand against the solid trunk of a tree. "This is ridiculous," she thought with a sigh.
As she put her hand on the trunk, it brushed against something soft and fuzzy on the tree - moss, she thought. She looked idly towards her hand and screamed. A tiny vampire bat, its fur short and glossy, had crawled onto her hand. As it paused, poised to sank its teeth into her skin, she flung the bat far into the woods with anothe shriek and ran from the tree. Hundreds of other bats, disturbed from their thousand-year-long sleep in the tree, flew up screeching into the air. Their wings blacked out what was left of the sun as she fled towards a scene that would have given Poe nightmares.
The girl snaps up from her sleep, her body covered in a cold sweat. She rises her eyes to see a canopy of gnarled oak branches, speared with flashes of a star-sparkled sky. Leaves cover her naked body like a blanket, keeping the cold from her skin as best they can.
The moon! She rises quickly, letting leaves and dirt fall in a shower around her. She races through the woods with the grace of a doe, leaping up and over branches and roots with ease, until she reaches a clearing where she can see the moon clearly. Clouds shroud it at the moment...but not for long, it would seem.
The girl watches in terror as the cloud moves on, letting the silver orb shed its light on all below.
A piercing wail shatters the silence of the forest, followed by the grinding of bone on bone, and the wet squish of skin tearing and ripping from the strain of something too large for it to hold.
The forest falls back into silence once more.
Only pierced by the mournful howl of a young she-wolf.
The bare arms of the trees reached overhead, the last few clinging gold and orange and red leaves illuminated by the moon. It was as if she walked through an ancient cathedral, and the heavy air was touched with the breath of the ages. To her sides, her lupine guides slunk through the trees like shadowy acolytes, processing toward a nave she dared not contemplate.
A fresher gust of wind kicked up the scattered leaves, sending them along ahead of her like frightened rabbits. The lines of a children's Halloween song teased at her memory... //'Tonight is the night when dead leaves fly...'// A quick shadow darted across the brightening face of the moon, and the girl looked up and gasped -- //'Like witches on switches across the sky'//.
Another flicker of movement caught her eye through the trees. A wolf? //'When elf and ghost and goblin host...'// A low growl behind her warned her to keep up the pace. And was it just her imagination, or was that ... music?
//'...dance around their queen, for it's Halloween.'//
Somewhere in the woods, the serpentine rattle of a tambourine. Somewhere in the woods, the seductive jangle of Gypsy bells. Somewhere in the woods, a trilling, lunatic piping. Somewhere in the woods, mad giggles and capers and prances and rustlings. Louder and louder, half-seen revelers flitting between the trees beyond her wolfish escort, a swirling crescendo of madness sweeping her onward, onward, toward the beckoning flames. And suddenly those flames drew close, leering faces swimming in and out of the mists and laughing cruelly and the wolves raising their heads in a devilish howl twining with the manic instrumentation and laughter and making her head spin about horribly or was it the world, was the whole world spinning like an Infernal carousel, and...
Silence.
She stood in a small clearing in the wood, the bare trees forming a spidery fence all around her. In the center of the clearing, a great iron kettle sat upon a crackling fire, its unguessable contents bubbling and smoking fitfully in the stillness. Beyond the kettle, near the far end of the clearing, crouched a low wigwam bedecked with countless trinkets of dubious nature: feathers, and skins, and small, rough-carved icons, and bones, so many bones...
The visitor walked slowly toward the hut, pausing a moment to glance down into the boiling, malodorous brew as she passed. Did some dark shape wriggle to the surface for a moment, swimming about in there amidst the frothing bubbles? No, surely not...
She looked back at the hut, her fire-dazzled eyes trying in vain to pierce the darkness beyond its low doorway. Nothing stirred within.
"H-hello?" she called timorously.
An errant breezed tugged at her hair, swirling the mists into hypnotic patterns.
"Hello, dearie," came a voice from behind her -- a dry, grating voice, filled to the brim with malignant humor.
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