Pg. 6

He left me there, at the edge of the woods. He left me there, unable to move. And I could hear the creatures behind me, crashing through the trees, heading straight towards me. I could hear them, and I could hear my heart, and I knew that they could hear its crash, crash, crash, and that they were heading right for me.

I stood there, eyes closed, listening to Aaron's mother screeching and banging. I listened as some other child got yelled at and started crying. I listened as a cow lowed in the distance, and I listened as the creature behind me came to the edge of the stream and stopped, moaning in desperation and anger.

I ran.

I ran straight up to my room and I hid, beneath covers that were not warm, but were protective. I lay there and I breathed heavily and then my mother came in to wake me up.

I walked slowly to school on legs that still shook, my heart still pumping furiously beneath my chest.

I bumped directly into Nor.

"You look terrible!" She said, with her characteristic glee when she got to give me good news. Or bad news that involved me, which she also considered good.

Pg. 5

Aaron and I would talk still, for a while longer. And although he had kissed her, although she had run away, he would never talk about Nor anymore.

He'd ask me, instead, what I did with myself. He knew there was nothing, that I did nothing that did not involve him or Nor. I would make up stories, stories about other friends I had made, a happy girl to whom people flocked, just to feel better about themselves.

A while after he kissed Nor, he started the games again.

One night, while hiding in an alley on the edge of the woods, he used his hands to do things that were not kissing. While he did this, he told me about his new friends, the ones that he liked to be seen with during the day and into the gloaming. The friends he left when I came around, because he didn't want anyone to know about our games.

"Porter likes to set fires. He set one yesterday and left one of my books near it. They all thought it was me. My mother near on tanned me bare." Here he lifted his shirt so I could see the marks, dark streaks, some tinged with faint tracks of blood.

I hated looking at the marks, but loved that it distracted his from hands from my skirt, where they were kneading and bunching but not actually doing anything. He had ruined so many of my skirts that way.

"Why would you play with people who cause trouble for you?"

"You cause absolutely no trouble for me at all, Cyn." He would do that, make up names for me that sounded dangerous or interesting. Mine wasn't. But he liked to feel like it was, like I was. It made him feel I was worth playing with.

"Not me, Aaron. Those boys. Everyone knows who they are, those boys. Everyone knows they're the ones who tore up the funeral field last summer and everyone knows they're the ones who stole that man's horse last month, and everyone knows --"

"That I'm one of them?"

"You're not, Aaron."

"I'm no good, haven't you heard?"

And of course, I laughed. What he meant was that everyone would tell him, over and over again, that he wasn't any good, that his brothers and sisters had all or would all amount to something. That he wouldn't. And instead of being bothered by it, he embraced it. He ran to those boys, the ones that revelled in being ignored like dirty secrets. He wanted to be a dirty secret, too.

"You're laughing, Cynda, but you know I'm right," He reached for me, it was time to play again. "You know I'm right, and you like it." He began not kissing me, and a light went on in my parents' house. He pulled me further into the shadows.

"Aaron, girl, I know you're there," It was my father. Of course he knew we were there, if he thought about it hard enough he'd know what we were doing, too. Aaron cringed, as though he could read my thoughts.

"Aaron, your mother is looking for you." He closed the door and the light disappeared. Aaron pulled me into the shadows, closer to the woods, and I froze. He seemed to like me freezing, and grabbed my hands for one last round. Then he shuddered and patted my head before running off across the village in the direction of his home.

I closed my eyes and listened closely. I could hear his mother screeching in the distance, and the firm slap as she hit him squarely with something large and flat.

Aaron never made a sound.

Pg. 4

There is a place that haunts me. It is not, probably, the type of place someone else would look at and immediately understand to be a haunting place. But we humans each have our own histories and concepts and ideas, some of which spring from fact and understanding, but most of which just appear to us, in a nightmare or a dream, and which then become the things of legend or horror in our mind.

For me, this place is one of both horror and legend, lodged in the back of my skull, knocking to be remembered. By day it is beautiful and peaceful, but by night creatures and monsters lurk and roam, alternately hunting and watching.

It is probably they who will finally have me.

My childhoom home is a small grey cottage. By no means idyllic, it housed, like most other homes, secrets, both happy and terrible and of course, neither happy nor terrible. At most times it was just a home. And sometimes it was part of the haunting.

Behind it lies a copse of trees, many of them old, older than man, or at least older than the people who put the cottage here. At the edge of the village, there is a forest, and my home was the house just before the edge of the village.

I've seen them in there at night, large creatures with large yellow teeth. They pace just behind the small stream which runs through the woods, the only thing that keeps them from running into the village -- Into my home first.

No one believes me, although the creatures cry all night, loud, futile cries of frustration that echo throughout the village as soon as the moon drops behind the horizon. Maybe other people have seen them, know they're there. But those people don't admit to it.

I wish I hadn't, either.

During the day small creatures live there, it is their domain. They flit and sparkle through the flowers and trees, granting wishes perhaps. Keeping the creatures at bay, even. They're small twinkling things that are mostly just seen out of hte corner of the eye.

The larger night creatures are best taken in by squinted eyes, turned away from them. Or not at all.

They are large and vaguely resemble men. They stand on legs, they swing their arms. They're hairy and stare with red and green and orange eyes.

I do'nt know if they're evil, or even if they're really there. But they watch me. And no one can stop them from doing it.

It's funny how sometimes you think that you're over something that used to scare you, worry you, wake you in the night. And then one evening you're chasing your favourite cat or niece or boy around a corner, and you're faced with the tall black trees, squeaking in the wind.

And you stop and look around.

And you're sure you can hear footsteps approaching you, but of course you freeze. Because this is like a nightmare, and you can't ever run in nightmares.

When the trees start crashing, when the leaves are rustling furiously, you stand and watch, knowing that this time is the last time you'll come around that corner at night. Or ever.

And the only thing that rescues you is someone's voice, a dog's bark... Something that draws your attention from the creature in the woods. Because if it sees you standing there...

I grew up by these woods, know them like the back of my hand.

And this is why I know what lives inside them.