Alanna Gillis 

Opinion Editor

amg7393@psu.edu

You’re never alone in the woods. Not really. Sure, there are small prey animals who are always there, watching, but there’s something else. Something more. 

It watches you in the way someone does when they try to learn how you do something- it watches with intent to follow.

Whenever it is around, you will know. Not consciously, but subconsciously. Something within the animal part of your brain flares up. Your body goes into high alert, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Gooseflesh ripples across your skin. Your senses sharpen, not in the way of a mountain lion as it narrows in on a kill, but in the way of the deer that awaits its fate.

You can feel the texture of the shirt you wear rubbing against every part of your skin; you can hear every rustle of leaves around you. Any bit of movement draws your eye. Do you see it yet? 

There.

Movement in the limbs of one of the trees behind you. You turn quickly, trying to find the cause. A bird, or a squirrel-your mind tells you to quench the panic rising in your gut- it has to be. But there is no animal amidst the limbs. It’s nothing, your brain insists, maybe you just missed it. Something had to be there. 

Oh, something was there, alright, because there it was again. Movement in your periphery. A shape stalking by you on your left. 

Rather than turn and search for it once more- because you don’t have to, it’s most definitely a bird if it’s moving that fast- you continue on your way. Maybe if you leave that space, that part of the woods, the feeling of eyes on you will disappear.

A naïve hope, but the only option at this point. There is nowhere else to go. The woods, all of them, are not your domain. 

Every now and then, you get a whiff of something dead, something rotten. Rotting. But that’s normal in the woods, you tell yourself; it’s the cycle of life. All things in the woods must die eventually. And still, you cannot help but feel that the scent of death is following you.

Again, a dark shape flashes through your periphery. Your mind is playing tricks on you, you decide. You’re scaring yourself over nothing. But, regardless of whether that were true, another wave of gooseflesh puckers down your skin. 

And then it steps out from behind a tree in front of you.

You see it fully only once; it is no longer the Hide-Behind. It is tall, too tall. Unnervingly tall. It is naught more than a skeleton covered in dark, decrepit flesh. Every bone in its body juts out. Its joints protrude, stretching the sinew around them. Its fingers are as long as your arm, and as gaunt as the rest of its body. Had there been any sunlight, they would have looked like the shadows of branches. 

Had you seen shadows that did not belong today? 

It does not matter now. 

The smell of carrion follows it. Whether it is succumbing to the slow decay of its own body, or the smell is the scent of its last meal drifting from its open maw, you cannot tell. 

And its face. 

Oh God its face.

 The eyes that have been watching you for so long, longer than you’ve realized, are recessed in their sockets. They do not glow as much as they suck in the light around them, and for a second you realize they remind you vaguely of someone who is blind. Cloudy and grey they look as though they can see everything and nothing at once. 

They see everything. 

The rest of its face is the only light thing about it. The exposed skull looks like it could have been human at one point, long ago. Time has warped the shape. The jaws have lengthened to accommodate the wicked, gleaming fangs which crunch when the creature finally shuts its mouth. Had you been able to move, you would have thought it to be the sound of your foot on the decaying leaves beneath you. 

Had you heard any sounds that did not belong today? 

It does not matter now. 

With terrible, silent speed the thing is upon you, eager to have you fill the void of starvation within it. It has survived on animals for too long; it misses the taste of human flesh.

It hungers.