The world's more full of weeping

Short Story | Horror/Dark Fiction | Disturbing imagery

The green-brown creature hovered at the edge of the forest. It was small, no more than two feet tall, with a hole where a nose and a mouth should be, a round belly, a white mark on its chest, and two cat’s eyes. It slouched, surveying the suburban yard.

Norma gawked at it through her binoculars, ignoring the birds at her feeder. Her cat, Stranger, an orange tabby, crouched in the armchair, showing only his eyes and ears, scanning the figure at the tree line. If it hadn’t been for him, she would’ve thought she was imagining it.

The thing was moving, slinking up the garden, hands-first, towards her fence.

She was losing focus. Fumbling with the binoculars, she wedged herself out of sight between the window’s edge and a side table, jostling the latter. A cup of tea tipped and a photograph thudded corner-first and face-up on the floor.

Peaking back out, she raised the binoculars.

The creature was stopped, eying something in the direction of her neighbor’s house. It changed course, sneaking across the adjoining yard and climbing the deck, inching its way across the banister until it squatted beneath a set of dangling sun catchers. Long fingers reached up and plucked a crystal, examining it by the light of the setting sun.

The creature’s head cocked, peering into the reflection.

Norma leapt back to her hiding place.

Quieting her breathing, she clutched the binoculars to her chest, studying her cat’s reactions.

Stranger’s ears and gaze darted left. Pupils dilated. His eyes floated right, right, and straight on. When he closed them, she knew it was safe to come out.

Norma’s grandmother had told her about these beings when she was little. She’d called them the Hidden Folk and said that their world and the human world ran side by side, planes of spirit and flesh, brought to collision under the right circumstances. They were kind when people were good to the trees, when they left out milk and whiskey, when no one stopped them from taking fruit out of the garden, but that was in the old days. They were always angry, now.

Norma had been sad for that. She’d imagined riding with them in their night hunts, following them to their cities beneath the earth, dancing with them in a circle of toadstools by the light of the full moon, and had played at doing so in full view of the forest.

She’d found a fairy path, just as the stories had said—a strait line of grass, lighter than the rest—and followed it into the woods, but her grandmother had come after her. Norma had been angry. Why shouldn’t they let her join their band, she’d never done them any harm? Her grandmother had lowered her voice. It’s man they’re angry with. All we can do now is keep clear of them. They’re always watching for doors into our world, to settle the score, and if they catch you looking for them, that’s as good as leaving the front latch open.

Tea dripped from the table onto the photograph. Hurrying to the kitchen, Norma brought back a cloth and began to sop up the sugared liquid, taking care to open the frame and clean every drop from the glass. It had been a long time since she’d seen the faded message written on the picture’s back. Only the beginning. I love you.

Mark. Their honeymoon in California.

She’d always imagined they would die on the same day, but here she was, afraid and alone save for her dear Stranger. A widow was a woman in a black-and-white photograph, unsmiling, in Victorian mourning clothes. Not her. But her husband had gone to sleep, aged sixty-four, and never woken up.

Their son had tried to move her half the country away to live with him. To rip her from the home they’d built together. She’d begged Ben to move in with her—bring the whole family, she’d said—but his job wouldn’t allow for it. He’d been watchful since then, keeping an extra close eye on her finances and her health—physical and mental—waiting for the moment when she’d give him an excuse to swoop in and carry her off.

She and Stranger would keep what they were seeing to themselves.

Cradling the cat and pulling the chair from the fireplace back into shadow, she turned it towards the window, keeping her watch, leaving the lights off and letting the fire burn itself out.

*

She woke with the sunrise to feed and water Stranger, whose dish hadn’t been touched. He nestled against her legs, ignoring the nearby water bowl.

Norma made herself a cup of tea and returned to her binoculars. Nothing looked out of place.

She lifted the cat onto her knee. He responded by placing his front paws on her shoulder—his sign of wanting to be held. Folding him in her arms and sinking her face into the soft fur on his neck, she obliged. He was getting thin. The veterinarian had said he would.

When breakfast was eaten, Norma poured herself another cup of tea and walked into her yard, studying her neighbor’s sun catcher. She looked up at the house. No one was home this time of day. She’d heard them leave for work. Taking a second look around, she put down her mug, passed her own property line and climbed the steps to the vandalized object.

It was whole. Every loop on the frame held a crystal. Nothing missing. She touched it, turned it, took it down to examine it. Good as new.

Descending the steps and glancing both ways as she crossed to the forest’s edge, Norma stopped at the mowed boundary and looked in.

Leaves rustled, allowing sunlight to pass along the woodland floor in a dotted line. One splotch joined another like dripping paint. A trick of the light. It formed a thread that led under the trees beyond her view. Flowing over grass, leaves, logs, stone, moss, it ran, one illumined fleck into the next until it pooled on the left toe of Norma’s gray house shoe.

Memories—of a straight line of grass, lighter than the rest, leading into the forest of her childhood, of tricks and treats, of stories like maps to hidden places, of offerings and asking favors—struck and lit up her mind.

*

Rinsing her mug, she returned to the living room to stroke Stranger. He lay in the armchair, his legs and paws tucked under him. Sleeping, but not purring. The vet’s mouth had tightened when he’d given her the news. He’d offered to put Stranger down that day, but Norma had been determined to take him home. She wouldn’t have him die in that place. The cat had been a gift from Mark on her sixtieth birthday, but he was gone, and soon Stranger would be too. The tumor growing on his liver would see to that.

Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she sat down beside the cat and looked out at the forest where the creature had first appeared.

She’d never done them any harm.

*

Norma had gone back and slipped the sun catcher off its hook. At the grocery, she’d purchased cream, honey, whiskey, and blackberries.

Packing the food in glass jars, she wrapped and bundled everything into a hiking pack, covered her cargo with a blanket and set Stranger on its folds inside the opening. He whimpered and fell silent. Kissing his head, she donned the bag.

The sun was in the last throws of setting. The moon had risen, its light hanging like a curtain on the trees, breaking through the branches in easterly shafts.

Norma stared into the woodland. The carpet of grass and moss on the forest floor was uniform save for a thin lunar-green line leading further in and out of sight. Shifting her pack and giving Stranger a last check, she entered.

*

Walking proved easier than she’d expected. It’d been years since she’d hiked, especially with a pack, but the ground seemed always to slope down.

Through the crown of the trees shone moonlight like crystals from a chandelier, tinging and chiming. It was the only sound she could hear. No owls. No rustling of deer in the undergrowth. She wondered how long and how far she’d wandered. Turning around to check her distance, she found no recognizable point, and the path behind her had disappeared. She squeezed the straps on her shoulders. The walk had been in a straight line. If she had to go back—

A hare crept onto the path and stopped, watching her with someone else’s eyes.

Laughter floated behind the trees. Tittering at first, then deepening into a laugh she knew.

When she’d told her son the only way she’d be leaving his childhood home was feet first, he’d rolled those eyes. Laughed just like that. A laugh that said ‘you’re a silly old woman.’

He didn’t mean it that way.

Of course he did. He’d never taken her seriously. Everything was a joke with him. He could’ve made the move if he’d wanted to, there was more than enough room for him and Celia and the kids, but his mother’s feelings were always something to be shuffled off and laughed at. He might as well pat her on the head.

Tears stung and sprang to Norma’s eyes. When she took her face out of her hands, the hare had disappeared.

*

The path ended in a clearing at a circle of brown and white mushrooms. Before it rose a rock slab embedded in the side of a hill.

Taking out her gifts, Norma placed them inside the mushroom ring, arranging them, careful to set Stranger in the center. She stepped into the circle, standing over the frail tabby, and looked out. The light faded.

Faces surrounded the clearing. Human faces which disobeyed all natural laws, horses, foxes, frog-like faces on the bodies of men, horns and tails on children, hares, hags, crawling, walking, slinking behind a brown-green face with two cat’s eyes and a hole where a nose and a mouth should be.

Norma and all of them twisted one way, while the rest of the forest and sky twisted the other. Drums pounded. They were coming closer, and she couldn’t speak. Couldn’t stay on her feet. Couldn’t keep her eyes open.

She woke in the gray-blue dew of early morning, pushing herself off the grass and rubbing the stiffness from her neck. She was outside the mushroom ring, looking in. The gifts were gone. Stranger’s body still lay as she had placed him, a ragged hole now gaping where the tumor had been.

Three lights stepped out of the darkness between ring and stone, coming to rest at Norma’s knees. Two eyes looked up at her. A cat’s eyes. And a circle of white shone against black fur in the animal’s chest. The cat swished its tail.

It was aware, searching, holding on the edge of a wail that would swallow her.

Norma trembled and reached out her hand. “Home, now?” She knew she must ask permission.

The cat raised a paw, and allowed itself to be carried.

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The picture is The Path in the Woods, Weston-super-Mare by Charles Edward Wright