These Woods, Her Woods

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Content Warning: This series includes violence, ritual harm, bullying, and psychological trauma involving teens. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

Read carefully. In Antigua Falls, even stories have teeth.

In this episode: Alistair Robinson has been hiding in the cabin for days, cold, hungry, and changed in ways he doesn’t understand. The Maw is no longer satisfied by the sacrifice of animals. It has been listening. Now it is ready to speak.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Interlude

Outside, beyond the mildewed curtain, Alistair could see Trent. His hair was slicked back—oily—and he was making his way up the path with his hands open to the sky like some old Jesus painting. His mouth moved, asking for a sign.

Last time he did that—

Alistair stopped the thought and inched away from the dirty window. He bit down on his bottom lip until he tasted blood. It was coppery and warm. He brought it close and breathed it in. It was blood, yes, but there was something underneath that. Turned earth. A hole.

His mind wandered to the old alleyway on Cherry Street. Third grade, when his mom was in night school learning to be a CNA. Most afternoons he was alone until four, when Damian got home. Alistair had to walk to his place to be babysat. It was not a friend he would have picked for himself.

He would walk the back way, dragging out the time kicking rocks and examining ant hills that seemed to bubble up mysteriously overnight, in the nooks and crannies of broken asphalt. The houses were simple, built on large tracts of land. Decades ago, the neighborhood had been a flourishing community of families. It was a launching point, a starter place for people looking forward to bigger and better things.

“That’s gonna be us,” his mother had told him over dinner, a college textbook open and overflowing with pink sticky notes. “Just you wait.”

His mother was getting that dreamy look in her eyes again. Even at nine, he knew that meant trouble. When he looked around, he didn’t see a bright future. The houses were like something out of a Dr. Seuss story but with none of the color, lopsided and broken down. The paint was arching back and away from crooked siding on most of them, like broken bodies with tetanus. Windows were boarded up, and graffiti symbols that Alistair was too young to make out, littered garage doors and fences.

The place was ghoulish and sad, until you got to old Ms. Wallace’s place. Her yard was cut, the grass like the hair of an army recruit, fresh from under the razor at basic. In the corner of her yard were a few raised garden beds. Alistair never saw anything bloom. Damian said Ms. Wallace’s back was too bent for her to garden anymore.

She let them dig around in the dirt for fun. The beds became a bait shop, where he and Damian would gather long, red worms they could cut up and put on sticks to take fishing in nearby ditches. There was a certain smell when you turned the earth over to find them. Something both pleasant and sharp. Decaying leaves mixed with gutter water. The earth swallowing the dead to feed something new.

Trent was murmuring again. The sound traveled easily between broken window seals. Alistair put a finger to his lip, and pulled it back to look at it. The liquid was dark and viscous. He held it up to the window in the single block of sunlight shining through a dirty window pane. His blood wasn’t just dark. It was black.

His heart revved up, and for a moment he felt another attack coming on. The same as the ones that started after he found the courtyard video. By then the whole school had seen it. Serena’s words echoed in his mind.

Don’t fucking touch me.

Even now, the memory of it twisted his insides. Trent told him that doing what they did to Lyla would make it better.

“I promise you. You will feel power like you've never known.”

It was true. There was an energy he could feel pulsing in him. His heartbeat was in his lips. A plop of black blood seeped out, and hit the warped wooden plank beneath him. The sound of it echoed, like he was in a cave. Everything came back to him in waves of agonizing technicolor.

That’s the catch.

He felt everything now, fear and anger and grief. He thought that better meant numb. Meant moving on from all this.

I didn’t mean to do it.

His mind’s eye opened to her body on the ground next to him. The ground was cold against his palms. Trent squatted in front of him.

“Stop crying. It’s better this way,” Trent said, and laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. Lyla was still. Alistair felt a shockwave go through him. His teeth chattered. “Anyway, it wasn’t you. It was the Maw.”

It had been quiet for hours by the time the door opened. Alistair held his breath, and waited for Trent. He would come in and dictate the next move, reveal whatever he had been told. But instead of dark hair, there was a peek of blonde. Gabe appeared, looked around like he was expecting someone else to be there, then motioned Connor in.

Alistair could smell their sweat beneath the musk of boy cologne and french fries. His stomach ached. How long had it been since he had last eaten?

“Close the door,” Alistair rasped. His throat ached whenever he spoke. He had been in the cabin for days, sleeping on the hard floor, letting the cold seep into him. His bones. His lungs.

“How you been buddy?” Gabe asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets awkwardly. He was smiling, but there was something beneath it. His jaw was tight, the muscles strained halfway down his neck.

“Okay I guess,” said Alistair. “Fucking hungry.”

“We figured,” said Gabe again, straining his mouth into a wide grin. He gestured to Connor. Alistair noticed the leather camera bag for the first time.

Connor maneuvered it off his shoulders carefully, like it was a glass vase that might shatter if he looked at it wrong. A muffled mewing started when he set it on the floor. Alistair felt like he would be sick. Connor set the bag on the ground carefully, then stood back and looked at the wall.

“What is it?”

Gabe knelt behind it, unzipped with careful precision, and pushed the sides of the brown leather bag until the top opened like a choir boy’s mouth. A chorus of meows started up as soon as the light hit their eyes. Three kittens, two calico and one white, stretched and toppled over one another, clamoring to get out of the bag.

Alistair could smell their damp fur, the residue of asphalt on their tiny paws. If their mother came within a hundred yards, he would have been able to smell her.

“No,” he said, and turned his face away in disgust.

“Hello boys.”

It was Trent’s voice, deep and serene. Alistair hadn’t noticed him come in. Gabe shot up, and beamed that nervous smile at him. Connor hung back, head bowed like the ground was suddenly interesting.

“You must have gotten my message,” Trent said.

Gabe nodded his head.

“We knew he would need to eat again before tonight.”

They were talking about him like he wasn’t there. He bit his lip, reopening the reservoir.

“I’m not eating that,” said Alistair.

Gabe and Connor looked at him, then back at Trent. Gabe’s eyes were blue flames, lit by his ever-deepening curiosity. And now? Now what happens?

Trent stayed still for a long time. When he finally moved, there was no sound. He was like he was a spirit.

Hovering over the waters.

He knelt in front of Alistair, but it wasn’t like Gabe. He was close. His eyes searched Alistair’s face. He raised his hand, turned it, and put the back of it to Alistair’s forehead. Trent stared up at the ceiling while he did it, like he was counting, and Alistair flashed back to so many sick nights, alone while his mom worked at the nursing home.

“You’re sick Alistair. You need blood.”

His heart started that awful thrumming again. He thought of the black blood on his finger. Trent was right. Something was wrong with him.

“It doesn’t sound good to you, but The Maw will help you. Let it in, and it will drink.”

Trent held his face in his hands, and Alistair couldn’t help it. He started to cry.

“It hurts,” he whimpered. His voice was high, like the sound of those helpless kittens.

“I know,” Trent said, and he held his head to his chest.

Alistair shuddered a breath out, and let his tears fall freely. He could hear the heavy plop, plop, plop on his jeans. He smelled acrid rain, the strange mix of something fresh, and something buried. Trent pulled away and stared into his eyes.

“Pain is power,” and with those words, Trent reached behind him into the bag and pulled out one of the kittens. He held it by the throat above both of their heads. Alistair could see it squirming, reaching it’s paws out to take hold of something, anything.

He closed his eyes, opened his palms in surrender. The kitten squealed, then stopped. The smell of blood filled his nostrils, replacing disgust with hunger. He drank.

When Alistair woke up he was alone in the cabin. The fragments of a recurring dream clung to him, warm against the gathering cold. He shut his eyes against the real world, and tried to remember.

There was a girl.

“Lyla?” he whispered to her.

She was only moon shadow now, faceless, long hair like steam evaporating. The images of that indigo world swirled until they disappeared. Then she was gone.

He opened his eyes and let the world come into focus. He could feel the skin of his palms when he stretched out his fingers, felt the tearing of dried blood. The last light of the day cast strange shadows on the wooden walls. He watched the trees move like withered hands, and listened. He could hear the boys outside, their voices hushed as they talked to Trent.

“I went to pull the card to bring it here, but it was gone.”

“Did Mace know where it was?” Trent asked.

“Yeah,” said Gabe. “We all did.”

“Why didn’t he come tonight?”

“He’s afraid,” said Connor. “We all are.”

Alistair heard a slap ring out in the dead forest. He thought of Lyla’s face, the bloom of red in the shape of his hand. The warmth of her cheek. The scene changed. Her features blurred and spread like watercolor. Dark crept in at the edges of his memory.

The moon shadow girl.

She was here. In the room with him. Her eyes were milky blue.

Not Lyla.

“Who are you?” he asked. His breath came out like a cloud.

Her wispy hair was silver in the moonlight. It floated around her, moved by some invisible current, like she was sitting underwater at the bottom of the pool.

“Blood didn’t work this time,” Trent said, his voice calm. Ever serene.

Like creek water.

The moon shadow girl smiled. Her teeth were black and smooth, slate river rocks worn by thousands of years of current.

“Do you know how to call for it?” asked Alistair. He was too weak to lift his head.

She nodded, still smiling, and turned her head towards the locked closet. The one none of them but Trent was allowed to open. Inside were the club’s belongings, remnants of that first scene. Files and evidence bags, all labeled with dates from the sacred year.

1984

The door creaked open, and the silvery girl stretched her arms up above her head until her fingertips came together. She looked like she was ready to dive. Her chin touched her ghost chest, and she pumped her arms down. Her body swam into the air, disappearing as the white moonlight streaming into the window hit her body. A piece of silvery paper floated down like a falling leaf from where she vanished.

Alistair watched it fall to the ground at his feet, and pushed himself up. It lay next to one of the dead cats, its lifeless body stiff. On the page was a word written in what looked like black ink. Alistair leaned forward and sniffed. Pennies. Blood.

WRITE

Trent had asked for a sign, and The Maw had delivered. Tonight, it didn’t need the blood of animals. It was ready to speak.