The Heartbeat in the Circle in the Woods

The Spookiest Thing that Has Ever Happened to Me

Sorry I missed the week of Halloween, but it’s Horror Week at Extelligence!

There are forests, Dear Reader, and then there are… forests. The first kind of forest is a little rivulet of trees running behind someone’s house or alongside a highway. It has been cleared of low branches and snares from all the foot traffic. There are no wild animals because all the people have scared them away. By simple force of human habit, the first kind of forest has been beaten into shape until it’s grown into a respectable, civilized republic of trees. You might walk a few feet into that kind of forest and think, “Well, boys, this is nature” and never-you-mind that you never once left the embrace of city lights.

Then, there is the second kind of forest. The kind where people almost never go because it’s too remote and there’s nothing there. Nothing a human being would want, anyway. The kind of forest you can only get to on ancient, barely-there-anymore logging roads or suffering your way through deer trails. Those forests are dark, deep, and easy to get turned around in. Those forests are not kind.

That day, myself, my brother, and our neighbor Adam were walking in the second kind of forest. This was an entirely stupid thing to do, and a form of idiocy entirely unavailable to children who grow up in cities.

“I weigh more than you guys!” I shouted from the far side of a log bridge, making fists out of my sweaty hands. The summer sun ran toward the horizon, and already the sky was turning from blue to red. But not enough to turn back. Not yet.

Adam and my brother taunted me from across the ravine.

“Come on, Guy!”

“Just get over here!”

“What if it snaps?” I retorted, incredulous.

The body of an evergreen lay across the ravine forming a bridge. The tree was twenty yards long, and wide, but it was also rotting. An adult would snap it for sure, and by most measures I was already the size of a large adult even if I was only thirteen. I ran a hand through my hair, still unsure.

“Chicken!”

Well, being a dumb kid, that did it.

As my uncle Mike used to say, “Are we testing for brains or are we testing for balls?”

Holding my breath, I straddled the log, as both Adam and my brother had done. I leaned forward, pulling myself along inch by inch. As neglectful as my parents were, if they had any idea what we were doing they would have never stopped yelling. My grandparents might have killed me themselves.

I looked down. A sense of vertigo, a feeling like I was a bird that suddenly had no wings, almost overcame me. The ravine was only thirty or so feet deep, but it was full of rocks, and broken branches. More than enough to kill a kid, in other words.

There were a few cracks, soft, but louder than gunshots to my ears when I reached the middle. The tree visibly bowed, but I kept going. There was nothing for it but to do it. We’d already walked all that way, up all the hills, and there was no turning back. I would never have said it aloud, but I also didn’t want to walk home alone.

“Is this where you guys saw the bear?” I asked.

Adam and my brother had seen a bear not long before this journey. Although my father had made both of them promise to never go back into the woods that far, it hadn’t taken them long to break their word. Besides, we were only out on “a walk.” If we just happened to go where they had seen a bear, well then, that was just happenstance.

None of us had talked about what might happen if we saw the bear again. Other than for stupid Boy Scout stuff like hold sticks over your head and banging them together. We certainly had no plans on what to do if it came back. We were, as I said, very young, and very dumb. It was late summer, and adventure had called too loud for an honest boy to ignore its summons.

“Nah, we were farther out than this,” my brother said.

Once clear of the evergreen bridge, I took a few minutes to dust myself. The crotch of my jeans was covered in dirt and bits of bark. The brown stains were like chaps in reverse. I resolved to hit them with the hose before anyone noticed once I got home.

I looked back over the ravine. The sides were steep, but not unscalable for a determined child. I didn’t know why I’d let them talk me into it. It was obviously the right path to have taken.

“We should climb the ravine on the way back. I don’t think that tree is going to hold much longer.” I demonstrated the fragility of the tree by kicking it. The whole bridge moved. I could have lifted the whole thing up and thrown it down. I think that, more than anything, got through to Adam and my brother.

I wondered why I hadn’t thought to do that on the other side.

“Yeah. We’ll climb on the way back. Anyway, let’s break for water,” Adam declared.

As any trip out into the woods demanded that we at least make some attempt at playing soldier, we’d all brought canteens and “provisions.” We sat in a circle, eating these victuals, talking about the dangerous things we might encounter. This lent credibility to the idea that we were not out on a picnic. Which would have been unforgivably feminine.

Adam and I were in the same class and had recently seen a film titled Charlie the Lonesome Cougar and thought seeing one might be worthwhile. Which, by the way, if you have to choose between seeing a cougar or a bear, choose fifty bears.

Stupid kid jokes followed. Stupid insults. Stupid talk. I don’t remember much of it.

For no other reason than that we had grown tired of eating saltine crackers and drinking tepid water, we decided to move on. I pressed the “glow” button on my watch even though I didn’t really need to, imagining that commandos did much the same in the jungle. We’d been gone for nearly three hours. I shared this information with the group. They shrugged, not seeming to mind much. I didn’t have a map but we were probably not far from the Olympic National Forest, but certainly far from the parts of it that most visitors came to see.

We’d declare forts soon, probably play for an hour and head back. We’d wait long enough that we’d need flashlights once we hit the road. I kept an eye out for sticks I could use as a gun. Our walk would be quicker going back since we’d spent so much of our time walking up hill. I remember looking forward to several books I hadn’t managed to read yet…

“What the hell is that?” Adam said, pointing at a tree stump.

I approached the stump, bent low, and extended a hand but became suddenly reluctant to touch it. The tree stump was perhaps four and a half feet in diameter. About three and a half feet remained sticking out of the ground. The interior of the stump was already rotted, so it looked to have been cleared long ago. That wasn’t the curious part.

There were three holes cut into the stump. Two where eyes would be, if the stump had eyes. One hole where a mouth would be if the stump had a mouth. It was a frightening visage.

“I know what this is,” I announced.

I knew, but even knowing didn’t stop the icy feeling in my stomach. I looked up at the sky again. It looked redder than before. Redder than it ought to have looked, I thought. “My dad told me about it. Back in the old days guys used to cut into trees like this so they’d have somewhere to stand to cut these big ones above where the trunk flares out.”

I pointed to the mouth-hole, “They’d stick a board in there,” then I pointed to the eye-holes “then two more in there. They’d use the bottom one to step up, and then they’d stand on the top two and cut down the tree.”

A cold arrived without wind, or at least I remember it that way and so do Adam and my brother.

I didn’t quite dare put my hand in the stump’s mouth-hole… because even though I knew it was only a tree, the eyes seemed to be glaring at me and I was almost sure the mouth-hole would clamp shut and chew my hand off. Or worse, press down on my hand and squeeze it flat just for the meanness and ugliness of it.

“How come there’s trees with ‘em that aren’t chopped down?” My brother asked.

My brother, Adam, and I looked around. Somehow, without realizing it we’d entered into a small clearing surrounded by a circle of trees that all seemed to be staring at us. My brother was right. Some of the trees had been cut with the three holes but not cut down.

The trees with the marks stared at us. Or, at least, they all happened to be facing toward us. If those trees had thoughts, their cold black eyes said they were full of rage. If they had words to speak, their ashen mouth-holes said they were calls of hunger. I swallowed dry air down my suddenly desiccated esophagus.

It occurred to me then that I could scream and no one would hear it for miles. The trees would swallow it all up and no one would ever know. Not in that kind of forest. In that kind of forest, why, you could never see someone again if they disappeared not even thirty feet from you. People told stories about that kind of thing happening all the time. Old hunters, experienced men, popping out of sight for a second and then… just gone.

I could swear, somewhere far away, beyond sight, there were monsters dancing in the woods. Quietly, closing around us in a circle. The monsters’ faces were lined with leaves like the manes of lions. Their teeth were made of white wood. Their skin was oak. And when their fingers pressed into you, it was like a shoot growing through cement. They burrowed.

There was nothing, of course. But there was the feeling of something.

I didn’t dare say I was frightened for fear of looking weak. After the log bridge, I couldn’t afford to look weak so soon. Besides, I knew what had made the holes. Loggers. Loggers like my dad knew. Loggers like I’d known all my life.

Loggers like the ones who always said the woods were haunted.

No one spoke for a very long time.

If there are bad places anywhere, well… perhaps not bad.  Call them “unquiet places.” There might be unquiet places in Grays Harbor. There is a dirt road with thirteen corners. People see witches and warlocks out there. People see aliens out there. Whatever they see, it’s never kind. The common denominator is that whatever is seen out there is cruel and hateful. I used to dismiss such stories out of hand, because of course the thirteen corners is also a place people like to go to do drugs. Now, I wonder if maybe the cause and effect might be backwards. Maybe it’s a place people go to do drugs because you can see those kinds of things there and nowhere else. Maybe those things want you to go there to see them. Maybe those… things even tempt a certain kind of person.

I don’t believe in the stories, I’m too educated for that. It’s just that I don’t disbelieve them either.

Then there are Old Graves in Fern Hill cemetery. Not the founder’s graves whose tombstones are already crumbling. Those are old graves but they are not, “The Old Graves.” The Old Graves are where bodies are buried without a marker. The part of the graveyard where the rain sometimes washes up human bones, hundreds of years old. I used to find them sometimes playing hide-and-seek with my friend Ritchie. Small knuckle bones from back when it was just one drunk logger burying some man who’d killed himself by accident out in the woods, and maybe one of them was Swedish and the other was a Slav, and they’d barely even spoken each other’s language enough to exchange names. No name to put on a tombstone, even. People saw ghosts there.

My uncle Mike swears that he walked into one of the condemned buildings downtown, back when he was a kid before it was torn down, and he saw Billy Gohl having a party with all the people he’d killed in the Floater Fleet. He’d watched the party, unseen, until Billy Gohl had looked at him and then he’d run away and there hadn’t been anything there the next day.

Like I said… perhaps there are unquiet places.

This place, out in the woods where only a child might go, and where a logging crew had apparently once sought fit to quit in the middle of their work a long time ago, was the most unquiet place I have ever been.

My knees shook.

All this, I can dismiss as childish fantasy. Even this, I would happily say is the work of my overactive imagination. All of this is hearsay, feeling, and speculation easily explained. I daresay, all of it is…

Except, that’s when the drums started.

Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom.

A rhythm of four, coming from every direction. Louder than a rock concert. I pissed myself, a little. Just a little, but it was piss. You couldn’t tell because of the dirt all over my crotch, but I pissed myself.

Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom.

Not quiet. Unquiet. LOUD! It sounded like the beating of a human heart the size of a mountain. The heart of all the trees of the forest. The heart of the tree faces that were staring at us. Or the war drum of the demons beyond sight, ready to come eat us. Tree branches shook with the force of it.

At the beginning of almost all terror there is a moment of confusion. There is a turning to one’s fellows, as if to ask “Is this really as frightening as it seems to be?” and after that pause, that is when the screaming begins.

Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom.

A sourceless sound. A sound hours away from everywhere else, inaccessible by car, and in the middle of a clearing of tree-faces.

My brother, Adam, and I screamed immediately without need for a pause. If I never again emit a note of such pure horror, I will go happily to my grave. Still, the drums were louder. Loud enough to drown out the screams of children. We cried. All of us. We sobbed. Even while running we wept. We were running swiftly, even me who was built for strength instead of speed, but the drums… the drums were chasing us.

Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom.

I knew as a child knows, that it was real. That there are places where the night does not rest easy, and that this place had woken up and it was screaming. The face of Satan pressed itself against the thinness there in the clearing. And it was as if the visage of his horns and his fangs was everywhere.

I ran, panting. Slow. Too slow.

Adam and my brother were leaving me behind. I was born big not fast. They were leaving me behind and I knew the drums would surround me. The drums would gobble me up. Lungs tearing, wanting to fall down as I did at soccer, my breath tore into my lungs. Childhood asthma that my father thought too womanly to treat. I would have run without any oxygen at all if it had been required.

My brother and Adam were so far ahead.

I cried harder. As hard as I have ever cried.

Behind me, I knew those eye-holes glinted with wickedness. Those mouth-holes flashed open and closed with longing in my mind. The worst would come when the thing that was the Drums, when the creature that made the sound, put its hands on me. I would piss myself all the way when that happened. I would shit. I would close my eyes, but when it turned me around to eat me my closed eyes would not stop it.

If I opened my eyes, what might I see? The real horror would come when I looked into the creatures eyes and saw the void that had been before creation. The moment when my light would falter and the dark would rush in all ravenously cold to smother the wick of my candle. Soul death.

Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom.

It was ever so slightly fainter. I saw the ravine. I did not bother with the Evergreen bridge. Bryan and Adam were already on the other side. Surely when we were all there together, we would be safe. I jumped down the steep walls, twisted my ankle in the dirt, and rolled to the bottom scratching myself along the way.

Full of adrenaline, I sprang back to my feet. Pain was distant. I dug into the opposite wall of the ravine with my knees and fingers. Adam and my brother leaned over the edge of the ravine, hands reaching down to grab me, their eyes fixed in the distance. I knew if they saw something, they’d run whether or not I was with them.

Close. So close.

I climbed the embankment as though swimming upwards through a river of dirt. My fingernails filled with soil, tore, and bled. I kept digging. Two pairs of hands grabbed the back of my shirt and dragged me up to the bank with desperate strength.

Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom.

Quieter now. Far away. Sleeping again.

Gone. All at once. The moment we’d crossed the small water at the bottom of the ravine.

We hobbled away as fast as my ankle would allow, still sparing glances behind us.

“You heard that right?” Adam asked.

“Yeah yeah,” my brother said.

“What was it?” I asked, wiping tears away with the back of one dirt-covered hand.

“I don’t know. But we all… I mean it was real. We all heard it? It wasn’t just in our imagination?”

“No. No we all heard it.”

We were home inside an hour and a half. The skies were gray, and I felt naked beneath them.

That night, I closed all the blinds so that I could see no trees. I turned on all the lights, and did not sleep at all.

And years later, when I told a version of this story on the internet, and someone commented with a link to a video that included the sound of a log banging against a rock in an underground stream, I said, “Well, goddammit. I guess that explains that one. Probably.”

I still wouldn’t go out there to check.