[Originally published in Theme of Absence, May 2020.]
It’s often said that some men have evil in their hearts, which sometimes leads us to wonder how that evil came to be there.
“Won’t you be cold at night out there, Grandpa?” asked little Eddie.
“Oh, I suppose it’ll be a mite chilly some nights,” answered Eddie’s grandpa, Elmer Ebsen. “But Fred and Davey will be with me, and we’ll always build a nice fire at night.”
“Well, I want you to take my quilt,” said Eddie.
“You’re a good kid, Eddie,” Elmer said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “I’m gonna miss you. Come on, now; let’s get ready for bed.”
***
The next morning, a little after sunrise, the entire population of Benson’s Corners walked the two miles out to Devil’s Woods, which was located just north of town.
Lunches had been packed and the mood was festive.
As they walked, Elmer carried an ax in one hand and held Eddie’s hand in the other.
“Are there really monsters in Devil’s Woods, Grandpa?” asked Eddie. “Bobby Kelso said there were and that you were crazy for going there.”
“There are monsters in the woods, Eddie, but it’s the job of the Grandfathers of Benson’s Corners to make sure they stay in the woods. Us Grandfathers aren’t crazy; we just want to keep the town safe.”
“But I don’t want you to die,” moaned Eddie.
“Oh, I’ll be all right,” said Elmer. “Fred and Davey are already there, and we’ll watch out for each other.
“Besides, we all die sometime, and what we’re doing is important. Grandfathers have had a good life in Benson’s Corners, and they’ve helped to establish families to make sure the Corners will always have folks living in it.
“And you’ll be a Grandfather, too, someday, Eddie.”
Eddie looked up and gave his Grandpa Elmer a strained smile. Bobby had also told him that Fred Gibson had gone into the woods last year, and Davey Kelso, his own grandpa, five years before. And neither had been heard from since.
“There’s probably a lot more grandpas out there too,” Bobby had added. He still missed his grandpa and was angry at him for going into the woods.
The adults of Benson’s Corners didn’t really expect to ever see the Grandfathers again, and rarely gave them a second thought once they went into the woods. But for the children, those Grandfathers were heroic figures, and they loved to invent stories about them.
The townsfolk merely felt that the fact no monsters ever came into the Corners was proof Fred, Davey, and the others before them were doing their job.
***
Lunch was held in a little meadow about a hundred yards from the woods. That was as close as the Benson’s Corners residents would go.
There was plenty of fried chicken, potato salad, cider, and blueberry and apple pie.
Some of the older kids made up a game to see who could get the closest to the woods, but the adults always called them back if they got closer than eighty yards or so.
Eddie stayed with his grandpa and his parents on their blanket. Grandpa Elmer pointed out the different trees, mostly oaks, elms, and maple. and Eddie listened attentively.
“Will you use your ax to cut down trees?” asked Eddie.
“Oh, no,” said Elmer. “The trees are our…they’re our allies against the monsters. This ax is to fight monsters if we have to.”
Eddie shivered at the thought of his grandpa facing a huge, snarling monster with just his ax.
“Been this way for nearly eighty years, now,” said Elmer to his family assembled on the blanket. “As the men of Benson’s Corners become grandpas, they prepare for the day they’ll leave to fight the monsters of Devil’s Woods. Once their oldest grandchild turns ten years old, they leave the town as heroes.”
No one alive today could remember ever hearing or seeing a monster from the woods, but the oral history of the town told of the slaughter of half of the town’s first settlers many years ago.
Mid-afternoon the townsfolk started to pack up their blankets and utensils to head back into Benson’s Corners. The food leftovers were carefully wrapped, placed in a large gunnysack, and given to Elmer. There was enough food and cider for at least three or four days.
Nobody knew what the Grandfathers ate or drank once the supplies in the gunnysack were gone.
***
There was an overgrown path leading into the woods at a place where the meadow abruptly ended. Elmer turned around for one last look at the retreating backs of the townspeople. Little Eddie was still standing where the family blanket had been and was waving sadly. It had been hard for Elmer to leave the boy.
But Elmer found he had mixed feelings about the rest of the townspeople. As he watched them going back to the safety of the town, a sudden urge came upon him to chase after them and kill as many of them as he could with his ax.
“It must be that I’m too close to these terrible woods,” he said to himself.
As he took his first steps onto the path into Devil’s Woods it was like somebody had come up behind him and stuffed cotton in his ears. All bird, animal, and insect sounds abruptly ceased. Even though there was a little breeze, no sound came from the leaves on the trees.
Elmer stopped and looked back toward the meadow. Trees had already closed off the path leading out of the woods; he could only move forward.
“Hello!” he shouted into the woods. “Fred? Davey?” The sound of the shouts seemed to die as soon as they left his mouth. He attempted to whistle the tune to a song that some of the children had been singing back at the luncheon. The whistling was muffled and off-key.
Elmer shrugged and started to once more walk the path. Occasionally there was a rustling sound in his head, the kind of sound leaves make in the fall as the wind pushes them up and down the sidewalk, first one direction, then another. But there was no wind blowing here, nor were there sidewalks, nor leaves on the grassy path. Only himself.
He didn’t look back again, but if he had, he would have seen that the trees were continuing to fill in the path behind him.
***
A half-hour later the path ended in a small clearing. In the center of the clearing was a large, flat chunk of granite. On top of that piece of rock lay two bodies on their backs in similar degrees of decomposition. Clutched in their hands were their ax handles. The ax heads were buried deeply into their skulls. The wounds were similar and appeared to be self-inflicted.
Elmer was pretty sure he had found Fred and Davey. Their gunnysacks lay close by and only a small amount of food had been eaten from them.
Around the base of the rock were the bones of four more Grandfathers and their axes.
Six Grandfathers.
“That’s odd,” mused Elmer. “If the town’s history is correct, there should only be five Grandfathers here.”
On the rock, next to Fred and Davey, was a sturdy traveling trunk made of oak and leather.
Elmer didn’t want to open that trunk, but he knew he had to; he sensed it was part of the ritual.
He climbed up onto the rock and dragged the trunk to one edge. Jumping back to the ground, he then reached for the box and carried it to a place in the grass away from all those dead Grandfathers.
He struggled with the rusty clasp for a bit and finally opened the trunk. On top of what looked to be reams of old, yellowed paper were some papers secured with a leather thong.
Elmer reluctantly loosened the thong and began to read the first page of those papers, fearing he was somehow contributing to his doom.
The trees had now encroached to form a ring around the rock, leaving only a few feet of grass between them and the granite.
He read:
These are the woods of the Devil.
I came here from the settlement when I wanted to be alone with my writing. I knew there was something off about the place, but I enjoyed the feeling of freedom that came with the privacy these woods offered.
And, yes, I enjoyed the shiver of malevolence that came upon me while here.
The trees are part of it! And this piece of granite, if that is what it is, is part of it too. They are in league. Together they somehow drew me here and filled my mind with hate.
I carried that hate with me each time I returned to the settlement. At my first grandson’s tenth birthday party, I unaccountably took my ax and slaughtered everyone in attendance, accepting him.
As I fled the town for these woods, these Devil woods, I killed a half dozen other townspeople who tried to stop me. No one who saw me lived.
The trees allowed me to pass to my chosen place upon the rock, but then closed off to deny the townspeople access.
The rock whispers to me. I can hear no other sounds in the woods. The animals seem to have gone, if they were ever even here. My mind won’t function as it once did. I have incomplete memories of most events before that birthday party and of the wanton slaughter that took place that day.
If the settlement grows and prospers, its boundaries may come close enough to these woods so that other minds may be affected.
Even now the trees and this rock are calling to the remaining settlers to send people to them as sacrifice. The settlers will do so and maybe even think it is their own idea.
There are no monsters here, but there is evil. I leave this record with the hope it will be found and that the settlement will then move to another place and set down roots in a place of purity.
Elmer retied these papers with the leather thong and put them back in the trunk. He hoisted the trunk back up onto the rock and then climbed up after it.
“Am I just supposed to bury my ax head into my own skull?” he demanded of the trees, now pressed up against the rock.
Though he was sure he had spoken aloud, he hadn’t heard the question with his ears.
Elmer had never felt more alone in his life.
***
That night, after eating a little from the gunnysack, Emer slept a restless sleep on the rock. Things he couldn’t quite catch were whispered in his ear and dreams of chasing screaming people caused him to moan fitfully.
The next morning, he had new insights as to the history and purpose of Devil’s Woods. The whisperings and dreams had entered his mind as confusion, but they now were thoughts of complete clarity.
The first Grandfather to follow the original Grandfather into the woods was a traveling minister and his extended family. The family had joined what remained of the early Benson’s Corners settlers after the massacre, and they were welcomed, as the fledgling town had had no minister.
But there was a reason this minister and his family were traveling. They had been in three small towns in four years and had been asked to leave by each town. In one of the towns, they had barely escaped with their lives.
The belief the minister held that caused the most outrage among the God-fearing folks of these towns was his conviction that God and the Devil were brothers, and each deserved to be worshiped equally by the people of Earth.
Even though most small towns tried their best to attract ministers to live in their communities, that sort of blasphemy could not be tolerated.
Near the time that the minister’s first grandson was going to be ten years old, he started to go into the woods with his ax with the intention of clearing a place in them to build a house for his family.
The decision to move to the woods wasn’t entirely the family’s choice. The minister’s sermons hadn’t set well with the town’s inhabitants and there were grumblings of discontent.
The minister told the townspeople he had “made a connection” with the woods and would be moving his family there.
He would no longer be their minister. His family would live and practice their religion in the woods.
On the night before his grandson’s birthday, the minister left for the woods with his ax. Earlier that day he had gotten into a heated discussion with some of the men at the general store.
“Someday I’ll come in here with my ax and kill you all!” he had said.
His family had been secretly relieved when he went on his visits to the woods. He had been becoming more and more violent in his ways recently, lashing out at everybody and anything, and they feared he was losing his mind.
When he didn’t return from the woods that evening or the following day, the family decided to wait a week and then move on.
He didn’t return and they did so.
The town felt he was welcome to the woods, but decided that every once in a while, someone should check on those woods they now felt weren’t quite right.
With some nudging from the rock and the trees, the ritual was born.
***
It wasn’t clear to Elmer why the minister hadn’t told the Benson’s Corners settlers of the trunk and its warnings. It was obviously there, it had been left by that early settler, the original Grandfather, who had used the woods for privacy. So why hadn’t he told them?
Maybe by the time the minister had found the trunk he had already “made a connection” with the woods, and had joined forces with its evil.
A personal memory, one long repressed by Elmer, now also came back to him. When Elmer was a young boy, his own grandfather, Alfred Ebsen, had decided to investigate the woods. Alfred didn’t believe in monsters or invisible evil, and when Elmer was nearing ten years old, he went as far as the edge of the woods.
Denied entrance by the trees, he slept there overnight and came back to the town the next morning unable to speak.
A month later, on the eve of Elmer’s tenth birthday, Alfred hung himself in his garage.
Thinking about this, a profound sadness came over Elmer. He thought about when he had told his grandson, Eddie, that someday he would be a Grandfather too.
The thought of that beloved little boy one day coming to these woods and plunging an ax head into his forehead caused him to weep.
“You’ve cursed us, damn you, and now I curse you!” he yelled at the trees and the stone.
With that muffled curse still hanging in the air around the evil rock and trees, Elmer lay down on the rock next to Fred and Davey and buried the ax into the top of his head.
The evil that existed within the trees and the flat rock savored the vehemence of the curse like a fine wine.
It knew another Grandfather would come along in a year or two, or maybe five or maybe ten.
There would always be more Grandfathers.
It could wait.
Unweaving A Tangled Web is available in both paperback and The Kindle Store on Amazon.com @ https://www.amazon.com/UNWEAVING-TANGLED-WEB-PRIVATE-INVESTIGATOR/dp/1912017091
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