DIGGIN' GRAVES: A Short Story

“Can’t  do it, just can’t do it…”

“Sure you can, Hal. They’re just woods, nothin’ bad in ‘em.”

“Well, there could be.” Kelly threw in. “With the Bears and Foxes and all………”

“Shut up, Kelly.” Vern’s word went unquestioned in the gang. “You’ll be fine, Hal. Nuthin’ dangerous in those woods, I know, I’ve been through every forest in the state except this one.”

“If there’s nothing there, then why aren’t we allowed in there?” Clara asked.

“Because Parents are buzz-kills, plain and simple. Now, who wants to go with me?”

Of course, because Vern’s word was unquestioned, they all raised their hands.

Vern picked up his backpack, full of camping supplies, and straightened his hat.

It was late in the Summer. Soon, School would begin, and the Camping Trips would start to become shorter and happen only on weekends, before eventually only lasting a night, and, when the Cold, bitter winter finally came, Schoolwork and the elements would choke out any and all remaining scraps of fun that Vern might have left over from the days when School seemed a million years away and the weather was as nice as he thought Clara was.

It’d be the only chance he’d have, too, to tell Clara he liked her. Whenever she wasn’t looking at him, he’d look at her. He wished he could do it all day, and though he’d felt this was since the beginning of May he just realized that he actually liked her the night before.

When you’re twelve, that’s how your brain works. The new feelings coming in can’t really be expressed or said yet. But Vern knew he liked Clara. Funny that he would – she was twiggy, had dark, red-brown hair and dark eyes, and a smile that could filled Vern with enough energy to launch him to the Moon.

“Let’s get the move on, Vern,” Hal said, already starting up the Hill. His white Khaki shorts sagged and his hair kept falling into his fat, sweaty face.

Behind him Kelly, with blonde, almost white hair down to her waist and tight jeans and an ‘Audioslave’ T-Shirt torn at the edges, ran up beside him, laughing and trying out their cartoon voices.

‘Doom-doom-doom, da-doom-doom-doom, DOOMY-DOOMY-DOOM………” Vern was glad Hal was far, faaaaar up ahead of him. The voice of Gir, the obnoxious and highly malfunctional robot from a popular cartoon at the time, absolutely drove him up the walls.

“Damn, do you think Hal actually enjoys sounding like nails on a chalkboard?” Vern asked Clara, who was walking besides him, about ten feet behind Hal and Kelly.

“I know Kelly likes it, for some reason,” Clara answered, rolling her eyes.

“I AM HUMAN, EARTH-MONKEYS!” Kelly shouted, in flawless imitation of an egomaniacal green alien from the same television show as the malfunctioning robot. “JUST LOOK AT MY HUMAN NECK!”

“I wonder if that raspy shouting hurts her throat,” Clara asked Vern.

“You guys doin’ a good job keepin’ up?” Hal yelled  from the top of the Hill.

“Decent job, by the looks of it,” Kelly laughed, her hair almost reflecting in the sun and her freckles more prominent than usual.

“I can’t believe,” Vern said, “That you’re almost twenty pounds heavier than me, and yet somehow you can walk faster.”

“It’s not fat!” Yelled Hal, laughing. “It’s aaaaaalllll MUSCLE!” And Kelly doubled over, cackling like a maniac. This sort of thing was common between them.

“I tell ya,” Clara said, “You got the best friends in the world when you’re Twelve.”

“We’ll be friends forever!” Kelly screeched. “Who says anything about growing up? I’m sure-as-Hell-and-Heaven never getting a day older than I am now!”

All of them laughed, except Vern, who just smirked.

“Yeah, you got a better chance of never leaving these woods,” Vern said.

“You wanna become Wild Kids?” Hal asked.

Clara looked at him funny. “Huh?” She asked, puzzled.

“We’ll be like Tarzan!” Hal continued. “We’ll just live in the wild,

“It would be nice to live in the wild,” Kelly said.

“No it wouldn’t.”

The voice that rebuked Kelly wasn’t Vern, or Hal, although it was a boy’s voice.

From behind them, trudging through the foliage and through the shafts of light that the tree branches permitted, was a stick-limbed boy, no older than 13. He had tired green eyes, shaggy black hair down to his neck, a black T-Shirt, and, like Hal, white Khaki shorts.

Around his neck was a necklace, seemingly made of some kind of wire, with a black, serrated object, like a tooth, tied at the center.

Vern, being the leader, walked to the front of the group and addressed him as though he was the chief of some remote, isolated tribe.

“What are you doin’ out here, kid?”

The kid stepped into the light, and that was when they saw he was carrying a shovel, alongside a torn, dirty and very old camouflage-colored duffel bag.

“I pretty much live here.” His voice was congested-sounding.

He let go of his Duffel Bag and Shovel and sat down on a log, his blank face supported by hand with black, fingerless gloves on them.

Kelly stifled a giggle. Hal looked at her. Clara just stared at him.

But Vern wanted more.

“You live out here?” He asked.

“I might as well, buddy.” The Kid said back.

Vern, knowing how intimidating he could seem, sat down besides him.

“Listen, Kid – you got a name?”

“Jay.”

“Listen, Jay – don’t call me buddy, first of all.” He smacked the kid on the back, hard, so he’d get the point.

He didn’t.

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

Vern gave him the evil eye.

“Vern, just forget it, let’s get – ” Kelly said.

“Don’t go in there.” Jay cut her off. 

Now they were all looking at him weird.

“It’s not safe in those woods. Coyotes been out lately, and you gotta keep out. Besides, didn’t you see the sign back in the front? ‘No Tresspassing’? Wasn’t that enough?”

“They never told us why it was off-limits,” Vern said. “So why not find out what they’re keeping from us?”

“Yeah!” Clara added.

“Coyotes wasn’t a good enough answer for you?” Jay said. “Fine, then there’s bears. And Mountain Lions. And Bobcats. Just about anything dangerous, you name it, it’s out there.”

“As if I wasn’t enough of a scaredy-cat of these woods. Any Bigfoots out there to watch out for?” Hal asked, trying to mask his fear and unintentionally sending Kelly into hysterical laughter.

“First of all,” said Jay, sounding even more congested now that he had to speak louder, “The plural of Bigfoot is Bigfeet. And no. No Bigfeet. Bigfeet are mythical creatures. Second, anything out there is a million times worse than any Bigfeet could be. And third, the blonde chick’s laughing pretty hard at your jokes. I think she likes you.”

Kelly’s freckles were overtaken by flushing red, Hal’s mouth drooped a little before he realized it was open, and Vern and Clara just started laughing.

“I have a lot more to do today,” Jay said, standing up. “So if you could please, turn around and go away, it’d be great. Thanks.”

“You’re not the boss of us, Freak!” Vern shouted, standing up. “What are you gonna do if we go out camping in there? In fact, what are you doing if these woods are so dangerous?”

“Yeah, what are you, some kind of Hippie lunatic or something?!” Clara shouted at him.

Kelly and Hal joined in on the laughter.

“Nope. Just got a job to do here. And if anything comes after me, I know how to deal with it. So go ahead. I’m gonna be busy tonight.”

“Well, while we’re out camping and actually having lives, what are you doing tonight, kid?” Clara asked, ready to get an answer she could use to mock him with.

He picked up his shovel, and his bag. Placing the rusty, old shovel over his shoulder, he turned around, not looking back.

His head down, he flatly stated his job.

“Diggin’ Graves.”

———————————————————————————————————————

Vern, Kelly, Hal and Clara set up Camp as deep within the woods as they could get.

They did all the things he said they would.

They roasted Marshmallows. Told Stories. Talked about the stars, and their favorite T.V. Shows, and grew a little closer.

Vern didn’t tell Clara how he felt. But he set up his tent with her, and they stayed talking, long into the night, even after the fire was out and Hal was snoring in the next tent over.

Vern thought about telling her he liked her. What would she say? Would she laugh at him? Would she say she liked him back? Would she turn him down, politely? Each possibility was both terrifying and splendid, his stomach seemed to flop like a fish and his skin tingled.

“Something the matter?” Clara asked him.

He sighed.

“Nah,” he said. “Just thinking a lot.”

“About that kid?”

Um, yeah, sure, let’s go with that, he thought.

“Yeah, about that kid.”

“Dude, forget him. He was a lunatic, just trying to scare us because that’s the only respect he can get. He was a pathetic loser, get over it. You don’t have to be actually scared of anything out here.”

“I’m not scared, just…”

“A little queasy?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, a little queasy. I don’t know why.”

She sighed.

“Happens to everyone. My Mom calls it anxiety. You think maybe you just don’t wanna go back to School in a week?”

He laughed nervously. “Yeah, that’s it. School. Just don’t wanna go back.”

“Ugh, I know what you mean. School’s such a pain-in-the-neck. I wish we could just spend all Summer out here.”

“Yeah,” Vern said. “Me too.”

Outside the night grew stronger and darker.

Slowly, minute by minute, the morning was approaching.

“You got anything else you wanted to tell me?” Clara asked.

Vern thought, long and hard, even though there was only a few seconds between her question and his answer.

“Nah. G’night, Clara.”

She smiled to him, that one that effected him so strongly.

“G’night, Verny.”

And then they both slipped into the darkness of sleep.

It wasn’t the sound that woke him in the night, but the silence.

Vern had been sleeping a good four or five hours into the night before he woke up. He couldn’t move, of course, he was too exhausted. But he lay there, staring up into nothing, wondering why it was he couldn’t sleep.

It had seemed lighter during the early evening when they plunked down. The top of the tent he could see through, and the light, blue sky had speckled with a few stars he could even see through the filmy tent cover. Crickets echoed, almost deafening, making their ree-ree noises into the night, having a battle of sound with the late-summer frogs, almost. Running water from the stream up ahead carried itself across the low, whispering wind, all of it coming together to calm Vern – the same calm he’d had for years, since his dad first took him camping with his sister when he was seven.

Now there was no sound.

No wind. No Crickets. No frogs. No stream. No light whatsoever. Only Clara’s soft, wheezy breathing, alone in complete and total oblivion.

He thought about waking her up. About tapping her on the Shoulder. But what if that didn’t work? Would he have to shake her out of it? She’d be angry then, and anything she liked about him at all would just vanish out of her. He’d never be able to tell her then...

“What is it, Verno?”

He bolted to the side, causing Clara to raise her eyebrows. She’d been awake the whole time!

“I, uh…”

“You, uh…?” She mimicked him.

He took a long, deep breath, and got ready to tell her that something was wrong here, because there was no sound, no crickets or streams or anything like that, and it was much too dark for the middle of the woods. You can see the stars here, he said loud and clear in his head, there’s no lights from buildings to block them out.

And, with the statement as clear as the water from the stream in his mind, he turned to tell her something was wrong here.

“Clara, I like you and I always have will you wanna be my girlfriend?”

What? That wasn’t what he meant to say! It all just came out, like one long, single sentence, unbroken, and now he was panting. He was out of breath from anxiety to begin with, now this. Perfect.

Clara just stared at him for a little chunk of eternity before saying something to him.

“You couldn’t have waited until after the sun came up to tell me this?” She asked flatly.

He thought to say something, and then, out of nowhere, something began to a approach their tent.

Out of the night, a raspy, dry-sounding voice coincided with a scratching on the outside of the tent.

“H-Hullo?” Clara asked, cautious.

“Uh, it’s Kelly. Get out here. You guys need to see this.”

They got up and got out.

Kelly, her clothes ruffled and hastily put on and her normally gleaming platinum-blonde hair now a tangled mess like Medusa’s Coils, was guzzling down the stream water she’d filled her canteen with.

“I think you better come with me.”

They followed her into the woods. Her figure, light-colored and easy to spot, stayed about six feet ahead of them as they navigated the giant, thick, black trees. She walked in and out of shafts of light permitted by the tree branches and the dark, blue-black sky.

“Did all the trees just suddenly die while we were asleep?” Asked Clara.

Vern looked around, to see what she was talking about.

In this part of the woods, all the trees appeared to be dead. They looked, rather unsettlingly, like claws reaching up for the stars. Or rather, for the starless, almost glowing blue sky above them.

“And is lightning normally black?” Asked Vern.

It was true. Echoing from the Thunder, Black Lightning stretched across the skies like the tendrils of some nightmare monster hidden by the clouds.

“That stuff gets stronger as you get deeper into the woods,” Kelly said. “C’mon, this way! We’re almost there!”

After another ten or fifteen minutes, they’d arrived at an area where Hal sat with his flashlight, under the shadow of what appeared to be a particularly bizarrely shaped Tree.

“Well?” Clara asked. “What is it?”

“We went for a walk because we couldn’t sleep, and we found – well, Hal,” Kelly said, turning to the frowning fat boy under the ‘tree’. “Show them.”

He turned his flashlight upwards, and this is what they saw:

The ‘Tree’ was not really a tree at all. It was, in fact, a group of black sticks, tied together with something like wet, red rope, and supporting the moldy, yellowed skull of –

Of what? It wasn’t human, it was too big. From top to bottom it was almost four feet long. And it wasn’t any animal’s, because almost all animals in this part of the world have long snouts. This was an animal with a face four feet long from forehead to chin, with a huge grin of jagged, broken teeth stretching from ear to ear – or in this case, from horn-to-horn. Each horn curling outwards, like a goat’s. And at the base, a circle of spike-like, equally yellowed bones that curved upwards, save for one broken at the midway point. Bones like found in a ribcage.

Its eyes would’ve been very, very large, from the looks of its eye-sockets.

“The eyes,” Kelly said. “The eyes face forward, like on a carnivore.”

“How do you know?” Clara asked.

“Because. Our Science Teacher. He explained, all predators have forward-facing eyes, so they can focus on prey.”

Hall stroked the thing’s long, mangy black mane, still attached to the skull.

“This thing could pick up a bear or a mountain lion in his teeth and eat them himself.” He said.

There was silence.

And then there was more silence.

And, for four twelve-year-olds, it seemed to stretch on towards infinity, like a great, crawling slug moving, ever so slowly, towards a flower.

“I think we should go now.” Clara said.

“Yeah, that’s probably – ”

And Hal was cut off by a sound from the Dead Forest, which now seemed, more than ever, like a dark and foreign Jungle.

A long, terrible roar – it started like the sound of a tiger, crossed with ghost, and by the end of the seemingly eternal roar, it sounded like the hiss of a hundred snakes crossed with the shrill cry of a human being in agony.

“We gotta run!” Kelly shrieked, and thus ensued Vern’s greatest fear – panic.

“Guys, calm down, the more noise you make the bigger – ” which was cut off by another echoing, booming roar from the same kind of creature. Possibly the same thing as whatever had its skull put on the sticks.   

Now, amidst the sound rising out of the Dead Forest, there was something else to break the silence.

Feet sprinting across the vegetation, cracking some and crushing others, creating a semi-constant noise, Clara’s low, upset crying, Hal’s tripping and falling and Kelly’s screaming and shouting for him. “C’mon, Hal, keep going!” Her strained, raspy voice cracked. “I won’t let you get killed! LET’S GO!”

And, in front of it all, was Vern, stretching his legs and trying to lead a safe, clear path back to their tents.

The roar, as if on a schedule, continued.

They continued to run, until they couldn’t hear it any more.

But when they stopped, at the edge of a clearing, nobody was relieved.

The Clearing they’d stopped in was the same one their tents had been in. Only now, those tents were torn to pieces.

Something – maybe the same sort of animal that had left the skull, maybe something else altogether, had torn through here, destroying the tents, the place where they’d built the fire, everything.

“Oh, God, this can’t be happening…” Clara said.

“What the Hell was that thing?” Vern asked. “What kind of animal makes that kind of a sound?!”

Hal regarded him angrily.

“I don’t know if you noticed, Vern, but I think the ‘No Trespassing’ sign was put there for a reason.” He tried to catch his breath.

“So what, we’re in a nature preserve for – whatever the Hell that was?!” Clara asked.

“I’m saying it might not have been trying to keep something in. I’m saying it might’ve been there to keep kids like us out.”

Vern stared him down.

“Well, Verno, this is a great mess you got us into. Look what’s happened. I told you, I didn’t wanna go, I couldn’t do it, just couldn’t be caught in these woods, and what did you do? You forced me in here!”

“You agreed to go!” Vern cut him off.

“Yeah, because you convinced me! You said there was nothing here, nothing dangerous…”

“You’re aware that, until tonight, I didn’t even know things like that were real, right?”

“Guys, shut up, it’ll hear us…” Kelly said.

“We gotta keep walking.” Clara said, dull.

“I don’t give a damn if it does! Maybe it’ll kill Vern, and all our troubles will be over!”

“Yeah, that’s nice, Hal, wish death on your own friend, great buddy you are…”

“Some I’d call my buddy wouldn’t have lied to me and lured me into a forest full of – whatever the hell these things are! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be going now. Kelly, c’mon, we’re gonna find a way outta here. Let them stay here and rot.”

“Hal, if we stay in a group, we’ve got a better chance of staying alive. C’mon, guys, we’re all friends here – ”

“Do, don’t act.” Hal said, stern.

Clara raised an eyebrow at him.

“Follow me, be my friend, or just stay here. Either way, you’re not my load anymore.”

And he turned around and walked away.

Kelly turned to Clara, then to Hal.

“Wait up!” She yelled.

But he didn’t listen.

She turned to Vern and Clara one last time, before turning back to Hal’s direction and, losing sight of him, running along like what Hal considered a ‘true friend’.

Clara looked at Vern, who was still red with anger.

“Ungrateful piece of…”

“C’mon, let’s go make sure he doesn’t get hurt.” Clara cut him off and, to Vern’s confusion, grabbing his hand and pulling him along with her.

———————————————————————————————————————

They must have walked for at least two hours without finding the way out of the woods.

“Hal,” Vern said, exhausted and dripping wet, “You’re lost.”

He either didn’t listen or didn’t hear him over the rain. He just kept trudging along, swatting away insects and wading through the wet vegetation.

Kelly had been trying to turn Hal back since he started.

“C’mon, Hal, it’s like a Jungle out here, we’re just going deeper and deeper…”

A sound rose the wind. This time the forced, high-pitched scream of yet another kind of unidentified animal.

The night had grown more and more alive with their excursions into the Jungle of the new world.

Sounds like a ringing bells, clearly the call of some other, stranger creature or group of creatures, drifted through the dead, black trees, rising from a low, terrible frequency to a high, ear-shattering one, and everything in between. Sounds like choked, gargling barks came from the skies, as great shadows drifted above them and the wingbeats of some unknown flyer echoed overhead.

After who knows how long, Hal sat down on a wet log, while Kelly sat next to him.

Vern finally caught up with him and let him know what he thought.

“You ready to admit you’re lost yet?” He asked.

Hal said nothing.

“You ready to admit you were wrong yet?”

Hal said nothing.

“You care to say anything at all?”

Hal said something.

“Shut up Vern.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just that I expected you to know your way out considering…”

“Rag it, Vern.” Kelly said.

Vern leaned against one of the black trees.

Clara leaned next to him.

“We may have to wait until Sunlight,” said Clara.

“We may have to hope we make it until sunlight,” said Hal.

As if response, a new kind of call echoed out of the darkness. This one more aggressive than the others.

“I think we should keep moving,” Kelly said.

“When you’re lost, you’re supposed to stay put!” Clara insisted.

“When you’re lost, and there are people who might find you. These woods are off-limits and the longer we sit here the easier a target we are,” Hal said. He sounded as calm as if he were simply reading off a shopping list.

More creatures sounded out from the darkness.

“Reminds me of a Documentary I saw,” Clara said.

Nobody said anything back.

“Discovery Channel. They were talkin’ about how, late at night, all the animals start up, making whatever noises they do – mating calls, attack calls, ya know – it’s like the world comes alive with sounds.”

“Yeah, well, here we are dealing with that now.” Hal said.

“Except I can’t figure out what any of these animals are.” Clara said. “We’re in the middle of a goddamn creature safari and we don’t know what they are.”

Another roar – the same raspy, pseudo-human one that had sent them running – echoed out of what they all now thought of as a New Jungle.

“There might be a market for studying these things. Scientists from all over the world will come to figure out how these things evolved, where their connection is to normal animals…”

“And I wanna live to tell ‘em,” Hal said, cutting Vern off. “So let’s get going.”

“We’ve been walking for hours!”  Clara whined.

“And now we’ll keep doing it!” Hal said. “Either you guys keep going or I will!” And Hal started off, once more, in a new direction.

He didn’t get very far.

As Kelly called out for him in vain, pulling on her tangled, blonde hair and straining her voice, Hal’s voice began to say something.

He didn’t get very far.

“Hey, guys! I think I…” And then an echoed scream shattered the night, joining the alien cacophony of sounds.

“HAL!” Kelly screamed, running into the night.

“KELLY, WAIT!” Vern shouted, grabbing Clara’s hand and pulling her with him.

They ran until they bumped into Kelly – and almost tipped her over, into the hole she was standing over.

Or rather, the very, very steep, wet cave that she was standing by. The rocks around it and the foliage over it had seemed to hide it, so that when Hal came across it he simply fell right in.

“OH MY GOD!” Hal’s voice echoed from deep within the cavern.

“What?!” Kelly shouted, her raspy voice strained and her eyes on the verge of exploding in tears.

“Oh Crap, Oh God, you guys, you better come see this!”

Kelly dove down and Clara dove after. Only Vern stayed back. He figured he was either being sensible, because he didn’t go down looking for them, or he was being selfish, because the other two in their gang had risked their lives trying to save Hal and he’d just stood at the mouth of the cavern.

Vern shouted down into the Cavern, trying to get a response – any response – from within.

“Vern, get down here, quick!”

He waited a minute. Then, the sounds of the Jungle around him, each from a new and unknown kind of creature, pressed him down into the Cavern.

He felt his way carefully across the wet, slippery rocks, feeling his way through the dark and praying frantically in his mind that he didn’t end up walking right into some new, dangerous animal.

Some rocks were jagged, some were smooth…but from a small distance, he could see a light, illuminating a small group of jagged stalagmites.

He heard whispers, like the sounds of people.

He remembered Hal had the flashlight and, cautiously, approached the rocks.

“Guys? You there?” He made his way up to the spikes, looked over, and saw them.

But that wasn’t why he was scared.

In front of them, while Hal fumbled with his dying flashlight and Kelly and Clara tried to help him up, was a mass of grey, webby substance, something like cobweb.

And stuck within it was a mass of bones. Some human, some animal, some that he couldn’t identify.

“Oh, God…”

“Yeah, we’re all aware, Vern, it’s awful. Let’s go, c’mon, Hal’s leg might be broken.” Clara lifted him up under one arm while Vern got the other one.

“Kelly, use the flashlight, lead us outta here.”

She picked up the flashlight and swept it across the cavern. Bugs crawled in and out of cracks in the roof of the cave, water dripped, the bones seemed to rattle.

“C’mon guys, let’s get going.”

They began up the rocky slope, up to the mouth of the cave.

A sound, like a snake’s rattle, began to grow.

“Guys, could we pick up the pace, maybe?” Hal said, his voice low.

“I’m doing my best, these rocks are slippery.” Kelly said.

“Yeah, you gotta be patient, dude, we’re trying.”

“Sorry, I just – ” Hal was cut off when he tripped over something and sent Clara stumbling backwards and Vern straight into the ground.

“Dammit, Hal, you almost knocked all my teeth out on one of these rocks…”

“I didn’t choose to trip!” Hal said.

“Well you did, and we gotta get over it,” Clara finished the argument before it began.

“Let’s go!” Kelly said, her patience completely diminished. She swept the flashlight back in their direction, and before she could say anything, all four of the children were focused on the thing advancing towards them.

Or rather, the things.

The grey, webby mass had risen up, dragging the bones with it, forming for itself a makeshift skeleton to support its cobweb flesh. It now towered almost to the roof of the cave, the skulls of many different animals – some human, some long like a horse’s or a bull’s, some short and fanged like a cat’s or a raccon’s – forming a makeshift head.

“C’mon let’s go!” Kelly shout, running back to grab Hal while Clara and Vern tried to push him forward.

“Guys don’t leave me in here!”

“We won’t, c’mon, run!”

And so it began, slipping and sliding on the rocks, the great, awful mass encroaching faster and faster, rattling as the bones hit each other and sliding against the jagged stones.

The children shouted, each one shouting something different, each one trying as hard as possible to save the others, each one trying to survive.

It might have taken a minute to leave the cave. For some, it felt like an hour. For most of the kids, though, it probably felt like a hundred thousand years.

And for however long it actually was, the bone-beast lurched after them, a dozen different skeletal arms reaching, clawing, searching.

Vern had focused all his energy into running, while holding onto Hal and trying to pull him along with him. He had focused so much of his energy, in fact, that when he finally fell outwards, back into the foliage of the Jungle, he could barely believe he was alive.

All four of them were panting like sled-dogs. All except Hal, who, still clutching the leg he’d broken during the fall into the cave, appeared to have passed out on the ground.

“Did you guys SEE THAT?!” Asked Kelly.

“Of course we saw it, we were standing right there!” Clara said.

“How did that happen? Is that even possible?” Vern seemed to be hyperventilating.

“Either way, I’m just glad it’s over with,” said Hal, coming back to consciousness.

“Me too,” Clara said. “Me too.”

Kelly stumbled towards Hal to hug him, and he pulled back.

“Hal, c’mon, I just wanna hug……….”

“That’s not it – I didn’t move.” Hal said, and looked around.

What he saw then caused him to scream louder than ever.

Staring him down, the rest of its body hidden in the blackness of the pit, was the skull of a long-snouted animal, on a long, thin neck. The top skull on the creature that had been chasing them. And, locked around Hal’s ankle, was a skeleton’s three-clawed hand.

“Guys, HELP…” It was the last thing he said before he was pulled in.

The Jangle of a thousand bones echoed out of the cave and into the forest.

Not Vern, or Kelly, or Clara dared to go back there.

They heard nothing from the inside of the cave, no matter how much they screamed for Hal to come back out, or at least say something.

And after that, they all sat outside, wondering if either bones or boy would rise up out of the darkness.

“You think maybe he’ll come back?” Kelly asked, snapping the silence like a twig.

Nobody answered her but the night.

But, with the sounds of living things unknown to modern man beginning to rise from everywhere around them as this new world came to life, one could say the night gave her an honest answer itself.

The night grew darker. Stronger.

Stranger.

And now they had to grow with it.

The rain, now sideways and causing the Jungle to reek of mud, swept over the three human figures.

And so they moved on.

———————————————————————————————————————

They didn’t say anything, walking uphill, in the direction of the rain.

“Anybody have any idea what time it is?” Vern asked.

“Anybody have any idea where the hell we’re even going?” Clara asked, flatly.

“No clue.” Kelly answered. “Hal had the light, and he – ” She stopped talking and didn’t continue.

“I think we’re near the edge of the woods, though.” Vern said. “And the end of the night. There’s fog now, blue, like in the morning. The sky’s a little lighter. And there’s so much space between the trees, I can see the horizon, and there’s rocks, those are mostly near the edge of forests – at least what I remember of this one.”

“Yeah, and I bet the friendly wildlife just slipped your memory,” Kelly said.

“Shut up, Kelly, fighting isn’t gonna get us outta here,” Clara defended him.

Vern, without even thinking about it, walked up besides her and put his arm around her, trying to shield her out of the rain.

He didn’t really think about anything he was doing anymore.

Here and there, Clara thought she could see things moving in the fog. She responded by walking a little faster.

“Hey, guys, do you hear that?” Asked Kelly.

“What?” Vern said.

“I think I hear running water…”

It only took Vern a few seconds to make the connection.

“The Stream!” He shouted.

Kelly bolted in the direction of the running water, and the other two followed, pursuing, searching, laughing, hoping for the best in whatever little hope they had left.

When they had finally located the sound of the running water, each one had a different expression.

Kelly was enthusiastic. She smiled for the first time. Clara was cautious.

Vern was disappointed.

They saw the water, black and nearly opaque, stretching down a ten-foot wide river. And, a little far upstream, a tree – more like a pine tree than the dead black ones of the deeper Jungle – had fallen over forming a makeshift bridge.

“There.” Kelly said. “Across that log.”

“It’s running in the same direction as the stream,” Clara said. “Let’s just follow it until we reach the Camp site, and we’ll move on from there…”

“No, we tried that. We thought we were moving in the right direction from there, we ended up deeper in the woods. We have to cross it. Move on from there.”

“The current’s too strong, Kelly,” he said. “If we fall over, we end up swept away, maybe to the ocean.”

“It’s that, or we go back in the direction of the cave.” She said. “The sooner we go over it, the sooner we get to some adults who can come back and find Hal.”

“Kelly – ” Vern grabbed Clara’s shoulder. He looked at her, in the dim light of the early-morning sky, and shook his head.

“Well, she’s right,” Vern said. “Last time we thought we were moving in the right direction, we weren’t, so across the river it is.”

Clara opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. 

“Clara, I just want us to all get home safe. That’s all I want. C’mon, I’ll go across first.”

He came up to the log and stood at the base.

It seemed thick enough to support him.

Seemed.

While crawling over the log, Vern watched for any sign, either in the sky or on either end of the stream, for anything approaching that might be dangerous.

He did not watch the stream. And that was where something dangerous hid. Vern didn’t notice, though, until after the water began to tremble and the log began to shake.

A giant hand had grabbed the middle section of the log. Ripped, rubbery skin like an amphibian’s gripped it tight, before lifting itself up out of the black water.

Vern fell across as the hand twisted the log. He fell, head first, into the water, and the rushing of the blackness past his ears and eyes overwhelmed him. From within the river he felt the bottom, all formed of smooth stones and only about five feet deep.

He tried to grab onto some of the rocks, tried, until he must’ve drifted almost fifteen feet away from where the log used to be.

He struck a hard edge – an unusually large stone – and managed to hold onto it long enough to lift himself up, gasping and trying to focus his eyes.

What he saw almost caused him to slip back into the river.

A creature on two long, relatively thin legs had lifted itself up from the stream. Standing besides it he saw the giant, dripping animal was fourteen feet tall, not including its horns.

Kelly had passed out, in one of the things giant hands at the end of one of its long, thin, green arms, and Clara was now in the other. Its head was smooth and white, like bone, its eyes like yellow orbs in its skull, and its mouth lipless and toothy. A mane of what looked like seaweed hung over almost all of its body, what had camouflaged it in the scummy, black river.

Now, dripping, giant and roaring, it stood amongst the trees, with Kelly and Clara in either one of its hands.

It raised its head and let out an awful, deafening roar – not the semi-human one from before, but one greater than the howl of any other creature known in time or nature.

“CLARA!” Vern yelled. “CLARA!”

But the fourteen-foot terror had already begun to walk away, its stride too much for Vern to keep up even if he still had the strength.

He buried his face in his hands after he pulled himself up out of the river. He buried his face in his hands and wondered how this could’ve happened. He never in a million years thought anything like this could happen. This time, yesterday, him and his friends were all just planning a camping trip.

Now he was along, by a black river, in a forest of monsters.

Alone.

He sat back against a tree. Where would he go from here?

Back home?

Where was home now?

What would he tell their parents when he got back? Would they believe him?

Eventually, after a while, he slept.

He had no dreams. But, in the thoughtless dark of his unconscious, a voice began to echo through his mind.

It was Clara’s, and it echoed very loudly.

“Vern?” She cried. “Vern? Verno? C’mon, we gotta go! C’mon!”

It continued until he finally woke.

And there, crouched on the rock by the river, crouched like an animal, Clara sat, staring at him.

There was a long silence where they stared at each other.

“Clara?” He asked.

“I’ve been waiting for you to get up since I found you. I found a way out! We gotta go, now!”

He just stared at her.

“Where’s Kelly? How did you get away from that thing?!” He shouted.

“I’ll explain later! Right now we gotta go!”

“What’s the rush?” He asked, getting up.

“Kelly’s…hurt. We need to help her, let’s go!”

With that, Vern jumped up and she jumped down and the two of them began running, in the opposite direction.

Deeper into the woods.

“C’mon, we’re almost there!” She said, running up ahead of him.

“Clara,” Vern wheezed. “Clara, wait up, I’m not feeling well,” he said, and began to cough uncontrollably.

“C’mon, hurry!” She shouted, and though Vern could no longer see her he followed the sound of her voice, all while squinting and trying to suppress coughs.

Eventually he couldn’t hear her any more. But now they were deep, back in the Jungle with the black trees and cloudy sky.

“C’mon, Vern!” He heard Clara from the side of him. “It’s just over this hill!”

Looking over, Vern saw Clara, on a hilltop in front of the dark red of the barely-risen sun.

She dove down, and he followed after.

It was when he reached the top of the Hill that he saw the place Clara had been moving towards. Walking into it, he now saw that Clara was nowhere to be found.

Clara had led him to what looked like an altar of aged, blue stone, nine pillars around a stone pad in the ground with a stone somehow with carvings depicting –

A beautiful, winged woman, perched on a rock, reaching a hand out as if to beckon someone.

And people, dozens, walking like in a trance, towards her.

He looked at the carvings and remembered something a History teacher had once told him.

“The Ancient Greeks,” he’d said, “Believed in Evil Spirits called Sirens, who would call people to them and hypnotize them, sometimes changing their shape like a mirage to look like someone the person loved………”

He turned around, and saw that Clara wasn’t Clara anymore.

Huge, Leathery wings, like a bat or a pteranodon’s, emerged from her back.

A huge, devious grin seemed to almost split her face in half to show her sharp, needly teeth.

And her eyes stopped looking at him like a twelve-year-old girl’s and started looking at him like a Hawk looks at a Mouse.

Vern, thin, twelve, and cornered, began to panic as a great, winged shadow cast its form over him.

If he screamed, nobody heard him.

After all, there was nobody else to hear him in these cold, desolate woods.

———————————————————————————————————————

Come Sunrise, he’d finished the last Grave. The one for the red-head who’d asked him what he’d be doing that night.

He had her body wrapped up in the hide of one of the red creatures, tied around her with rusted chain.

He looked at the Totem, the Wendigo Skull on the sticks, gently caressing his necklace in his hand. Or rather, the Devil-Tooth he’d placed on the center, to ward away any other Devils that might try to stalk and hunt him, as they were prone to do.

He’d had to get the fat one’s body by using his Tribal Charms, the ones his grandmother had given him when the time came for him to try and keep humans out of these woods. It was a job his father and his father’s father had done before him, for uncounted generations before history began.

He swung the two necklaces of tooth and bone, repelling the cob-webbed mass of creatures it had consumed, backing into a corner. He took the fat one out of the mass and back to the Totem, the Wendigo Skull on the poles.

He distracted the Behemoth with a doe on a spear. He propped it up and while the gargantuan monster knelt down to pick the stick up and eat the deer carcass, he’d tiptoed around and took the blonde and the redhead out of the tree.

The Siren was, as always, the easiest. She never finished her kills at once and so he just grabbed the guy off the altar, bagged him up and dragged him away.

He’d put the redhead down for her final rest, but for now, he’d sit on the stump by the edge of the Forest.

The stars began to fade.

The cold air drifted over him, smelling of pine-needles and wet earth.

His sweat drifted down his body, onto his old and well-trusted shovel, his best friend, the weapon he’d used to kill the first monster he ever saw.

He thought back to it as the wild, awful call of one of the Screamers rose up out of the dark, dead forest. The Screamers were harmless, if hideous, man-sized creatures that used their ear-shattering sound to scare off predators. It struck him how much like a human the last, strained parts of the scream sounded, besides the snake-like rattling.

Next to him, the monument he’d built to warn away anyone stupid enough to come by these woods stood in gruesome glory.

It was a pole, formed of the rotting, black trees.

And on that pole, tribal and bizarre, was the skull of the Wendigo, a kind of monster that the Native Americans named and feared for thousands of years. One that Jay killed himself, distracting it with a dummy and dropping a huge stone on its exposed head from above.

Next time he would do a better job of guarding these grounds. He would do a better job of keeping out anyone who didn’t know not to go there, as the mantle of ‘guardian’ was passed down to him. He’d figured that if he were frantic about warning them away they’d simply report him to the authorities, have him arrested, and leave the grounds unguarded.

Ignorant folks might come in.

And curious things might get out.

So he tried to be calm and tell them to leave.

Next time he’d have to do something different. Something more drastic. It was his first year as guardian. He wondered how his father did during his thirteenth birthday, when the mantle was passed to him. He wondered if any of the guardians before him ever messed up sometimes.

He wondered if they felt as bad as he did about anyone who slipped in and didn’t make it out.

Because he had nobody to talk to but the Totem, he decided to talk to it. It wouldn’t talk back, but he didn’t mind.

“Told ‘em so,” said Jay to the Wendigo Skull. The cool morning air and the rising sun washed over him. For now, everything was serene.

Almost perfect.

“I told ‘em, I’d be Diggin’ Graves.”