Re: Hunt; deep in the woods
The hands of a clock were fickle things, and they did not favor little boys and their nightmares. If time slowed for a monster as he watched the scene unfold – the screeching hag with her bone-handled knife and a small, dark shape that gasped for breath while it scrambled back through the fallen leaves, clutching his branch, desperate to get away -, then it slithered into something more like molasses to a boy with a bleeding hole in his side and no teddy bear to staunch the flow. It felt almost like those dreams where he was running from the bad men and his feet wouldn’t work right, except it was a grey terror that stuck him to the ground this time. And he had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t about to wake up in his Mama’s bed.
All the more dizzying, then, when the skeleton man had suddenly been right there between the boy and the banshee’s reach, no time to even blink or gasp. He’d realized in that moment just how much power the monster had been hiding away under his bones. How close the boy had come to… well. He hadn’t needed to finish the thought when he’d gotten his own front row demonstration. The monster and the hag, how they’d circled each other in some sick kind of dance, it had made him dizzy. He had started to sway. And then the boy had swung out like the whole team was counting on him to hit that sucker into the next field over and it bolstered him, for just a moment. Gave him strength to see the woman fall.
He looked, of course. He couldn’t look away. As any stubborn and curious little boy would have, unable to obey. He felt simply detached at first from the horror, almost reminded of his Mama and the way the bad men kissed her. And then the sounds started back up, and the boy’s eyes widened, filled with hot tears, spilled over. They traced new paths down his filthy cheeks and dripped onto his collar. The noises, horrible, stuffed themselves into his ears so tight that he started to shake with an involuntary violence.
Still he couldn’t look away.
Even as he tumbled to the ground (weak with a sour fear and the insistent burning of the wound under his shirt) his eyes stayed wide, peeled open like something else had power over them. A bright-shining terror for terrible things. The most he could do was to scrabble away on his hands and knees as fast as he could, fingers tearing through rotted leaves and worms and creepy-crawlies with too many legs. The taste of sick rose in his tightened throat, and he nearly choked in it when the skeleton man had finished making his mess and turned his attention back to a little boy in the muck. A boy who had, in his desperation to escape, found the hard edge of something that pressed into his palm, cold and deadly.
The knife still shone with his blood when he brandished it out before him, hands trembling. “Don’t,” he gasped out his warning. His lower lip shook, and there was a splatter of the banshee’s blood across his face as result of her gruesome end. “Don’t come near me. Don’t you ever come near me again.”
From the corner of his eye, the little boy spotted a tuft of brown fur peeking out from under a tangle of roots. Only a few steps away, but the dead-thing stood in the way and the boy very much wanted to live. More tears, furious this time, raked their way through the gore on his cheeks. He would come back. He would come back for his bear before it was too late and the bad things found it. And before they found him.
The lonely boy nodded once to himself, and slipped back into the darkness of the forest. He would escape. He was fast.