Literary Orphans

The Woods Behind
by Marek Jones

Marek_fore_ash

By the time this is read by another living soul there will be no corroboration available for what I write here. The school, the city, the woods, and perhaps even the entire world of which I write will all be long gone before any strangers receive this letter or any of its copies. It will all be swallowed whole by a horror that must be left nameless lest its invocation summon its presence once again. And I shall be gone with them, unless my will fails me in the last moments and I make some mad attempt at escape, though I know that escape is hardly an accurate description given the hounded life that would await me. But this letter will survive. I know the symbols of warding and the words of protection and the rites of blessing which will ensure it is not erased in its entirety, with both its present and past existence torn out of reality and forgotten by all who knew it or would have known it. Such is the fate of Goldwood, California, and all its inhabitants. This, the story of Goldwood’s dissolution, is the cursed knowledge that I will pass on to you as a warning against trifling with the same powers that it dared to harbor, and so that you will know what you bargain for in doing so.

I would like to write of the entire history of the city, to describe its culture and locale so that some chronicle of it might last even after it is banished from the known universe, to deliver a defiant last stand against the evil obliteration that even now looms over it. But I am not a student of history, nor anthropology, nor geography, so my capacity for such an undertaking is limited. I am a student of literature, and one that has a unique familiarity with the exact nature of Goldwood’s ultimate demise. So I shall turn my humble skills to the task of relating how the end finally came and pray that my words may be of some use yet to the inhabitants of any similarly doomed city, who may not know what similar evils could bear down on them.

I first learned of the evil on a bright spring day, while walking in the woods behind the campus of Goldwood State University. The city shared its little valley with the Sacramento River, and the nourishment it gave the plantlife that bordered all sides of the city was rich enough to make one believe they were walking in an age before civilization. Many of the hiking trails that wind in through the trees and hills were worn to the point of suggesting use by Indians in the long gone past, and it was nourishing to body, mind and soul to tread them in such beautiful weather. I frequented them often when I needed an escape from classwork, wandering aimlessly and purposefully getting half-lost among the peaceful woods.

On such a walk I first came across the boy in black coming towards me from deeper in the woods. I never succeeded in getting his name, and perhaps if I had I could’ve more easily parsed the mystery he became. He was also a student at the college, pale-skinned with fair blond hair and a dedication to wearing all black clothes and a black coat in any weather. He never seemed to suffer from the heat, and may have been, in fact, perpetually cold due to some illness or his unhealthy thinness. I had seen him around campus before and shared a few classes with him during a previous term, and in that time I never heard him speak. Like other students I had made no attempt to interact with the strange boy. But seeing him on the trail that day revealed us to have a common interest, humanizing the silent stoic in my eyes, and I was compelled to greet him cheerfully as a kindred hiker.

He looked up with a start, having been staring at the ground with a faint smile as he walked, and peered at me curiously, as if trying to determine what language I was speaking. After a moment he returned my greeting in a more baritone voice than I’d expected, and asked what brought me into the woods. I responded that I simply enjoyed walking amidst the peaceful scenery. He nodded and agreed that the woods were a gratifyingly serene place. Not having any real destination in mind I decided to walk with him back towards campus, discussing our favorite trails and secret spots. His knowledge of hidden areas was far more expansive than mine, including secreted branches of the Sacramento which emerged from underground in secluded glens, a number of little clearings and groves where ancient runes had been carved into the still more ancient trees, and dark caves that connected down to the remnants of the Old Goldwood upon which the present one had been built after the devastating floods of the 19th century. I was thoroughly impressed with his knowledge and asked how he had managed to discover so many of the forest’s secrets.

He became quiet for a moment, clearly debating how much of his method to reveal and how best to phrase it, before asking me if I had ever considered what secret or ancient lore might be accessible at our college. When he saw my confusion, he continued to explain that with the vast number and variety of intellectuals that collect at a campus over each year, even a fringe subject such as occultism could be expected to accrue a wealth of knowledge, and a hoard of studiers, over time. Just as people from all over came to colleges in order to study art, science, and literature, some people inevitably became drawn to more arcane subjects.

And as the town of Goldwood was no stranger to mystical aesthetic, there was no shortage of occult information if one knew where to investigate. The locations of ancient Maidu Indian sacred grounds present since the first civilizations built on this land, carvings indicating makeshift churches erected by pious miners during the gold rush, hidden shrines to Taoist and Buddhist deities built by the many Japanese and Chinese immigrants who came during the boomtown period of railroad building, and even spots used for the rituals of the nameless serpent cult which had only risen in the last century, along with who knows how many other strange and mysterious places and practices, could all be learned of with simple straightforward investigation. The boy had undertaken just such efforts to uncover this information. Furthermore, he assured me he was not alone in this, and that the woods behind the campus grounds were never wanting for practitioners of dark and ancient rites.

I found it difficult to believe, at the time, that there were people our age who held any interest in arcane lore at a modern school. I fashioned an image of substance-using spiritualists holding séances and playing bongo drums while reciting ancient words whose meanings were only half-known to them. This image of what passed for present-day occultists might’ve satisfied me were it not for the boy, who was quite obviously not anything like it. So I asked for some details about exactly how he knew there were so many people interested in mystic arts at the college, and what sorts of practices one who believed in sorcery and spirits might engage in.

He found my skepticism amusing, and as the trees receded and gave way to the dirt road which connected the school’s rearmost dormitories, he turned back to look deep into the twisting paths beneath the thick branches and said I should visit the woods at night some time if I wanted to see what magic could still be worked, even in these modern times where science and agnosticism held so much more popular weight. He also invited me to investigate the library’s many texts concerning the matter. Not the speculative or outlandish works written more for entertainment purposes than anything else, but ones which delve deep into the practices of ancient and mystic rites like the Kyabalion, von Junt’s book of Nameless Cults, essays on the half-legendary Naacal people, etc. As he made these suggestions, I felt as though he was daring me to act on them, smiling with secret knowledge as he hinted at what I might learn if I followed his advice. I cut our conversation short after that, and we parted ways as we headed to our respective dormitories. I was surprised to see that he lived only a few buildings away from me, as I’d never seen him in passing before.

The boy in black disappeared that same night, though nobody noticed for several days. His professors thought he was cutting class. Residents of his dorm said it was not unusual for him to remain in his room unseen for extended periods of time. In truth nobody really gave much thought to the boy, so his absence might’ve been disregarded for the entire school term if the resident advisor had not come knocking on his door repeatedly to invite him to some inane community event he had planned. The police performed a cursory search of the woods, but of course they assumed that he had either run away or committed suicide, as is common of unhappy and solitary teenagers.

Truthfully I had come to much the same conclusion, until the day of a class field trip to the local museum. There, staring at a display case, was the boy in black. The instant I saw him he looked up and smiled at me. Then, in the time it took for me to blink, he vanished. Shaken, I reasoned that I must’ve mistaken someone else for him, or imagined the incident entirely, but there are reasons why I describe my sighting of him as a person and not a thing, an “it” as is the proper term for an imagined apparition.

I did disregard the sighting at first, though I still went to see what was contained in the display case that had captured his attention. The artifact in question was a small slate of rock with a white petroglyph of a snake entwined within the branches of a tree, its tongue emerging from a sinister grin as it looked threateningly from its coiled perch. A placard on the display case informed me that it had been made by the serpent-worshiping offshoot of the Maidu people who had dwelt in the Sacramento area during ancient times. Though a remarkably well-preserved specimen of the old culture, with fascinating detail for primitive art, there did not appear to be anything really strange or mystical about it.

That very night, the museum was broken into, and the rock carving was the only thing stolen.

Some months later as I was walking downtown on an errand, I saw the boy across the street from me. He was following a disturbed-looking Chinese man who was wearing a ratty t-shirt and torn jeans and apparently muttering to himself. As was the case last time, the moment I caught sight of him he looked away from the object of his interest and met my gaze, then disappeared as soon as I blinked. The next day the man was reported missing on the local news.

I am sure the pattern that continued to unfold is obvious. I saw the boy several more times, and each preceded another disappearance. A pendant made from gold-flecked greenish-black rock displayed in a curiosity shop, an article on supernatural occurrences written by “Ms. Scarlet” submitted for publication in the local paper (along with its author), an entire house at the location of 23 River Street. Eventually I began trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. You may find it strange that a rational, educated college student would become so obsessed with such paranormal activity, and I myself do not fully understand why I felt compelled to pursue the mystery at no small expense to my studies, and do so in total secrecy. Perhaps the sudden vanishing of a schoolmate, even one I barely knew, had more traumatic impact on me than I realized. Perhaps I was naturally drawn to the curious reappearance of his image in conjunction with the abduction of people and things, abductions that I could not possibly have foreseen and yet by some strange power still persistently had an ominous vision preceding them. Perhaps some such strange power that I even now do not fully comprehend influenced me as well.

Whatever the reason, I delved into occult lore, obscure news reports, and historical records. I wish I had the time to go into the details of all the things I learned, but I know that revealing too much will invoke those same powers that I aim to warn against. So know only that I read those books whispered to me by the boy on that bright spring day and more, and with their knowledge found hidden and secret sites where dark revelations lay waiting for me. And slowly I pieced together the secret of what powers dwelled in those dark woods. Though the particular path walked by the boy in black vanished after that fateful day, just as everything else that had so entranced his gaze, I learned enough to guess what had lain at the end of it. And I say to you, reader, that even if you should believe no other part of my letter, my last gasp from the edge of the abyss, believe that there are dangers lurking in the blackest hearts of any unpopulated wilderness, whether it is made from wood or sand or concrete. Experiments in art and science and what can be called nothing else but magic conducted by wild geniuses over centuries of nighttimes may grow in any place secluded enough to conceal them. Things that challenge all we know about nature and law may yet be hiding, may yet be plotting, in the most unassuming corners of our world.

The influence of these things, these evil ones as ancient as time itself, is so small it could be almost unnoticeable, at first. But slow as it may be, the tightening grip of evil will always end in annihilation, however long it may take. Those dark things have a darker purpose for such plodding destruction, and they are relentless in its deployment. Disaster upon disaster shall pile up as the coils of terrible and hungry powers squeeze ever tighter around their prey. Like the little disappearances, they appear to be natural occurrences, perhaps tragic in some ways but far from prophetic of unspeakable doom. I am sure that I missed many of those that occurred in Goldwood even after I had begun my investigation, but I shall tell of all that I saw so that you might recognize the warning signs if your home sees them.

The first one I remember noticing was the cold. It gripped the entire town and held fast, allowing no warmth to persist out of doors for a single instant. The sun would give no heat, no matter how brightly it shined, and though such temperatures during that season were not unheard of in the mercurial weather of California, it was unusual for them to last as long as they did, especially when unaccompanied by any noticeable rain or wind. With no visible weather to blame for the sudden cold snap, I thought to myself that it was as if something were sucking the heat out of the town, and with horror realized the significance of this thought. For if such a thing was indeed the culprit, mere heat would not sustain its appetite for long.

Some time after the cold began, I began noticing that many of the local stores were going out of business, their buildings emptied and left vacant with unrealistically hopeful real-estate signs posted in their windows. Such buildings became oppressively common on the downtown streets, and I began avoiding ever going there, not wanting to meet the dead gaze of their windows and wonder what became of their former owners. In the suburban areas too more and more buildings became available for rent or sale, and though the news made no report of disappearances I began to suspect that some of the buildings themselves were vanishing as empty lots became more frequent than empty buildings.

With the downturn of business, it wouldn’t surprise anyone that crime rates soon rose. Yet few of the crimes were related to burglary or theft. Instead the increase was of vandalism, arson, murder, acts of senseless violence that those who committed them could gain nothing from. It was destruction purely for destruction’s sake. And from my own observations, I know that the cause was not gang activity as the police suspected. For though more and more shadowy figures loitered amidst dark corners and alleys at odd hours, there were no common colors or symbols among them, nothing to indicate gang membership even in the largest groups. The increase in hostility was independent of common criminal desire.

I cannot help but wonder how many more warnings there were before those first few. In hindsight I can just grasp a sense of growing urgency, tension, and fear yet I can’t be sure of when it had started. Were there always so many reports of inhuman violence in the news? How long had it normally taken for the cold season to finally turn warm again? Just when did there seem to be fewer smiling faces on the street and more hostile, scowling strangers? Was it always so common to hear a police siren wailing in the distance? Had the cats and dogs always yowled with such fervent urgency in the middle of the night?

It is too late for Goldwood. Since its very foundation, there have been those who called upon powers they did not understand and could not control. This is not a phenomenon unique to Goldwood, and I would not be surprised if soon many cities across the world began to find themselves plagued by their own harbingers of destruction, their own boys in black. I hope that my letter will reach those it needs to in time for them to recognize the signs and escape the oncoming doom before it becomes too late. I will send as many of them out as I can, these last remnants of Goldwood. I pray they do not come too late.

O Typekey Divider

This is Marek Jones’ first publication. When he is not being incredibly excited about this he spends his time writing more stories, fawning over the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, and making a tabletop role-playing game called Crone with his friends.

Marek-Enjoying-Nature

O Typekey Divider

–Art by Ashley Tsosie-Mahieu

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