Short Story Sunday: Alone in the Woods

"In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive."
— Haruki Murakami

 

 Alone in the Woods

The clouds passed over the sun, diffusing its light.  She always liked those days, when the light was yellow-tinged and oblique.  He had a better chance of seeing her on those days.  The air felt crisp on his face, a sign of winter’s coming.  He pulled the edges of his coat tighter around him and jumped the stream where it bottle-necked.  The path had grown rockier in his absence.  But the trees were the same.  They were just as tall, lofting over his head like a cathedral ceiling, their branches meeting at the top of the arch.  He could almost hear her laughter echoing through them.  Almost.

The circle of stumps was waiting up ahead, and he kept his eyes down on his feet.  He wasn’t sure if he could bear the sight of them empty again.  He reached the edge of the circle and glanced up, slowly.  His eyes took in what he already felt in his gut; a painful emptiness.  The stump to the right of his was overturned and bare.  She was not here, nor had she been for some time.  He stood, watching as a patch of light danced over the fallen stump, shifting with the sway of the trees overhead.  The realization that he was alone, not just in the woods but in the entire universe, overtook him then, buckling his knees and twisting his insides.  His glasses slipped from his nose into the dirt and everything receded, as though he was far removed and still much too close all at once.  He wiped the wetness from a whiskered cheek and let out a choked sob.

“Hey, are you alright?”

He sniffled and felt the ground for his glasses, wondering if he was starting to hear things now, too.

“Buddy, you okay?” she asked, as her blurry form appeared in the middle of the circle of stumps.

His hands fumbled for the glasses as his breath caught in his throat.  There was a huskiness to this voice that Layla never had, but beneath that was a hint of her timbre.  He stuttered at her as his fingers finally closed around the cold frame of his glasses.  He pushed them up on the bridge of his nose and looked to the circle.  She stood, leaning on one hip, her dark curls escaping from a braid on one side.  The plaid of her shirt was a riot of unnatural colors; pinks, blues, and purples, standing out among the native green of the trees.  She narrowed her round eyes and raised her brows, watching him skeptically.  Layla had never, in the twelve years he knew her, even so much as touched anything plaid.

“Did you hurt yourself or something?  Was it the stump?  I tripped over that damn thing, too.  Almost rolled my ankle.  Who leaves a bunch of stumps in the middle of a hiking trail, anyway?” She shook her head and swatted a curl out of her eyes.  “You out here all by yourself?”

“No.  I mean, yes,” he replied, pulling his legs out from under him and crossing them.

She walked over to the stump, Layla’s stump, and began rolling it away from the others, off the path.

“No!” his shout echoed off the high ceiling of trees.

She froze with her hands beneath the stump and stared at him.  “I’m sorry.  Is this, like, your little pow-wow space or something?”  She eyed him warily, as if she was just beginning to put the pieces of a very strange puzzle together.  She backed away and reached down for her pack behind one of the stumps.

“What’s your name?” she asked, plopping down on the farthest stump across from him.

“Thomas.”

“I’m Liz.  You hike here often, Tom?”  The way she said his name, her lips lingering together on the m, called forth an onslaught of memories.

“Yes.  And it’s Thomas, not Tom.”

“Sorry.  I like hiking alone, too.  It really clears the mind.  Makes you forget about all the crazy shit that goes on, doesn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“Thomas, are you sure you’re okay?  You look like you were crying.”

He looked away, back toward the path that brought him there.  “I wasn’t.”

“Well, maybe you can help me.  I’m looking for this place a friend told me about.  You ever heard the story of the White Lady?”

Thomas looked up, toward the arched branches above.  The branch hanging directly overhead was almost as thick as the trunk itself and curved back down toward the ground like an outstretched arm.  A notch in the middle still held a frayed thread in its clutches.  He sniffled again, and met Liz’s wary gaze across the circle.

“I’m not sure.  Something about a ghost, right?”

“Well, the story goes that some girl hung herself out here in these woods, just to get away from her crazy husband.  What a couple of wack jobs, right?  Anyway, I’m kind of into the paranormal stuff, and people say, on a cloudy day, you can see her out here, wandering through the woods.”

A twig snapped somewhere off the trail, causing them both to jump and then laugh at their own nerves.  Thomas rose from the ground and wiped the remnants of a tear from his dirt-smeared cheek.  He lowered himself onto the familiar stump and couldn’t keep his eyes away from the overturned one next to him.

“Crazy husband, huh?”

She laughed again.  “Yeah.  From what I’ve heard, he was screwed six ways to Sunday.  I mean, you’d have to be pretty batshit crazy if your own wife thought the only way to get away from you was to hang herself, don’t you think?”

A tremor shook Thomas’s hands and he squeezed them tightly into fists in his lap.  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”  The emptiness swirled inside him, churning his insides like white-capped waves in the wind.

“But it’s all just a ghost story, you know?  Just people, making shit up when they’re alone in the woods.  And bored.”

She laughed again and brushed another curl from her eyes.  The way her hands moved, with a hidden grace that alluded to something soft and innocent within, reminded him of Layla.  He drew in a deep breath of warm, rich air and let it out through his cracked lips.

“I think I have heard that story.  There’s more to it, though.  I heard it’s the husband that haunts the woods, looking for her.”

His eyes met hers again, across the circle, and his stare was hard and cold.

“Looking for anyone.”