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.