by J. Thorn
The icy air on his cheeks shook Henry from his daze. He wrapped his arms around the tree trunk and he turned his head. He would fall if he didn’t move. He reached through the trap door, grabbed on to the edge, and started to pull himself to safety. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t have the strength to make it, but then he braced his yellow rain boot against a branch and launched himself through the opening like a champagne cork being popped.
Henry rolled across the floor, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply while pulling his knees to his chest, rocking himself gently. He knew this wasn’t the Big Boy way to handle the situation, but he couldn’t help himself. He was more scared by the near disaster than he had ever been in his entire life.
He could still feel himself almost falling, and he understood for the first time how easily death could come for anyone, even little boys. He wasn’t sure if he believed in the Heaven and the Hell the preacher at church talked about, and he definitely wasn’t sure where little boys who snuck off into the woods were sent when it came to the afterlife, but he was certain he would rather not learn the answers to those questions anytime soon.
Once his breathing had returned to normal, Henry opened his eyes. The roof of the old structure was partially collapsed and the dark wood of the walls and floor were rotten in places. There were crude windows on three sides and Henry could see he was above the rest of the trees. The gray clouds swirled through the valley, the wispy remains of the unexpected winter storm.
Henry turned to look for the trap door—he didn’t want to fall through when he moved—and that was when he saw the skeleton sitting in the far corner.
And that was when Henry screamed.
The wordless sounds coming from his throat didn’t even sound human to him, much less like any noise he could willfully make—and for a moment he was certain the shriek had come from the skeleton. His scream echoed through the woods.
After a moment, though, Henry stopped. He tried to calm himself the way his mother would if she were here. He had already acted like a baby once today; he was supposed to be a Big Boy. Yes, the skeleton was scary, but it couldn’t hurt him, right? A skeleton was a person who had been dead for a long time, and a dead person was a sad thing, but the dead couldn’t hurt the living. His parents had explained this to him once while dressing him in his Sunday church outfit on a Tuesday morning, the day of his grandmother’s funeral the previous summer.
Now Henry studied the skeleton of a child about his age. The skull was grinning. The skeleton wasn’t as scary as Henry first thought, but what did frighten him was the tattered yellow rain slicker and the boots—they reminded him of what he was wearing.
Henry closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. When he opened his eyes again, the skeleton was gone.
The bones hadn’t even existed in the first place, and Henry had no idea what to think now. It was as if one of the games he liked to play in the yard had gotten out of hand—as if the line between his imagination and the real world had blurred and he didn’t even realize it was a game.
Henry stood and approached the corner where the bones had been, careful to avoid the trap door.
There were no bones, but there was a necklace. The silver was tarnished. Henry picked up the chain, tentatively touched the metal Christ hanging from the loop. The metal was cold and he wondered where the necklace had come from. Why would someone leave something like this in a tree house? How could it have been forgotten? What happened to the previous owner?
Henry dropped the necklace in his pocket, put his hands on the crude window, and gazed out over the endless forest and the snow-covered river in the distance. The sight was beautiful, but Henry was concerned by the coldness he felt tightening inside himself, as if he was still on the verge of falling. Only the height wasn’t what made him nervous. His parents always said he was a thoughtful boy and he accepted he spent more time just thinking about stuff than other kids, but he didn’t know how to be any other way. He simply was the way he was.
So Henry stood in the empty tree house and he stared at the snowy winter landscape and he contemplated what was happening in his ever-expanding world of youthful magic and wonder.
A few moments later, right as he felt the floor crumbling under his feet, he noticed the movement in the bushes beyond the clearing: thousands of white rabbits with dark red eyes, all of them bounding through the woods like a herd of cattle.
But before Henry could really grasp the bizarreness of the spectacle, his entire world flipped upside down and he was falling for real.
THE PRESENT
(6)
A Brave Man or a Coward
Henry the Adult has never considered himself to be either a brave man or a coward, but now he knows which side of the fence he falls on when strange things happen. He’s a coward and he plans on having no problem telling everyone that once he learns what made the sound in the cellar. And what moved the flashlight.
Henry sits in the attic and listens to the storm blowing against his house. He’s a grown man and there must be a reasonable explanation for what happened. He tells himself this because he understands it’s what he’s supposed to believe as an adult.
The problem is, Henry thinks as he sits in the darkened attic with the door locked, there is not a good explanation.
Sometimes he may spend hours lost in his imagination, certain there are mysterious forces at work in the universe that allow him to take the worries in his head and transform them into beautiful and disturbing images painted on a canvas, but he’s not ready to admit there could actually be some kind of monster in his cellar. Those kinds of thoughts open the doors to madness. There must be a better explanation.
“Those stupid rats!” Henry cries, quickly latching on to the sanest idea his semi-hysterical mind can conjure. “Could they have made that sound? They certainly could have moved the flashlight, right? Of course they could! They’re always moving crap down there.”
Which was true. Sometimes, when he and Sarah were in the kitchen, they’d hear the clang of the rusty tools being knocked together. Sometimes it even sounded like the cabinet doors in the old workshop were opening and closing as the rats searched for food and supplies to build their nests in the foundation walls and wherever else they might roam.
Henry isn’t convinced the rats were the source of the sound and the movement, but he is an adult—a grown man with a wife and a child—and he understands he’s not allowed to accept the possibility there might really be monsters in the world. Not until he exhausts every natural explanation, no matter how strange.
Henry unlocks the attic door and heads downstairs.
THE BIRTH OF THE ARTIST
(7)
One moment Henry was gazing through the crudely made window at the snow-covered forest, the next moment everything had gone black. He had no idea where he was and he couldn’t remember what had happened, but when he blinked open his eyes the world was very dark and very wet—and an extremely heavy weight was pressing on his chest.
Then images and sounds flashed into his mind:
The creaking of the tree house crumbling under his weight.
His terrified attempt to grab on to the window.
The plummet through the branches, which smacked at him like the heavy fists of the biggest bully at school.
Then his memories collided with a wall of darkness.
Henry rolled over, blinking until the blurry winter light stopped spinning. He was deep in the snow bank at the base of the tree. He stared into the gray and blue sky, bewildered, watching the clouds gliding to the east.
Henry had lost his gloves somewhere along the way, and his entire body ached, and his heart was racing, and he was breathing hard—and best of all, he was alive!
Henry spotted the jagged hole in the floor of the tree house high above. He thought about the skeleton he had imagined for a moment, the one wearing a yellow rain slicker and boots. He slipped his hand into his pocket and touched the necklace. The cool metal kissed his sw
eaty flesh. That, at least, had been real.
There was something else, too, from before the fall. Something beyond the clearing. Something moving, darting through the bushes.
Rabbits! Henry thought, pushing himself to his knees and climbing out of the snow mound that had miraculously broken his fall and saved his life.
Henry started across the clearing, moving slowly at first, gingerly testing his legs to confirm they were okay. He felt a warm wetness on his face; he touched the cut above his eye. He dug into his pocket where his mother always stuffed a couple of tissues so he could blow his nose instead of sniffing, a bad habit he hadn’t broken yet. He dabbed at the wound as he approached the edge of the clearing.
Henry pushed through the bushes and stepped onto a narrow path near where he had seen the hundreds of rabbits. The sight had been surreal and beautiful. There was no sign of them now, but their tracks remained in the freshly fallen snow.
Ahead of Henry was uncharted territory. He had never traveled in this direction before and he had no idea what might be waiting for him.
Henry studied the path, a snowy opening between the bushes and the trees. He remembered the warnings about the dangers of the forest and traveling alone. Bad things could happen to little boys who wandered off the marked trail. He had heard the stories.
But those rabbits….
Henry closed his eyes and saw them again. He wanted to discover where they had been headed in such an organized group. And why?
Yes, the forest could be dangerous, but he had survived that amazing fall, right? What could be worse than that? How could there possibly be anything more dangerous than that?
Henry glanced back at the dilapidated tree house, then turned and followed the rabbit tracks deeper into the woods.
THE PRESENT
(7)
Into the Cellar Again
When Henry returns to the kitchen, the house is eerily void of the strange sounds he heard earlier. He doesn’t go straight for the cellar door, though. He wants to get something to light the way…and maybe a weapon, too, in case one of the rats is rabid.
Henry removes the child safety lock on the cabinets under the kitchen sink. There are cleaners and rags and sponges, along with a heavy Mag-Lite. There are no real weapons in the house. He grabs the flashlight and relocks the cabinets—ever mindful of the need to keep the cleaners and poisons locked away from Dillon’s curious hands—and then he makes his way to the cellar door.
Henry pushes the door open, peeks around the corner into the darkness. He hears nothing. He sees nothing but the dark. The glow of the flashlight he dropped earlier is gone.
He points his Mag-Lite to cut through the gloom, illuminating a small patch of the dirt floor. He moves slowly down to the cellar, one step at a time, carefully listening and watching.
When Henry reaches the third step from the bottom, he quickly crouches and uses the Mag-Lite to search the cellar. The boiler is dark, silent. The other flashlight has been pushed into the far corner. The lens and bulb are shattered and coated with blood.
The blood is not human.
Surrounding the broken flashlight, littering the base of the boiler, are hundreds of dead rats, their bodies ripped to pieces, their intestines hanging from the boiler’s pipes like jagged lengths of string, their beady eyes popped and leaking. The stench hits Henry like a fist and his stomach flips, sending bile into his mouth. He vomits onto the dirt floor, but he doesn’t retreat, not yet. There is something even more disturbing and he can’t take his eyes off it.
There is a freshly dug hole in the middle of the dirt floor. A big one. About the size of a grave. A mound of soil is piled off to the sides. Henry proceeds down the last two steps and carefully circles the hole, peering into it, afraid of what he will see. There’s nothing. There’s also no easy way to explain how the opening in the dirt came to be in such a short time.
Henry’s whispers: “What the hell is going on?”
As if in reply, there’s a harsh growl behind him from the direction of the boiler.
Henry spins at the sound, but the Mag-Lite is knocked from his hand before he can glimpse anything in the dark. The flashlight shatters against the stone wall, plunging the cellar into pitch darkness.
There’s another growl, huge and echoing, and then something cold and sharp grabs at Henry’s arms.
He screams and breaks free from the icy grip and spins around to flee and then, at the last second, he remembers the grave-like hole lurking between him and the stairs.
In his panic, he almost jumps directly into the low-lying support beams—but he realizes his error just in time and he dives forward like a kid playing Superman.
His momentum carries him across the grave and he lands hard and rolls onto the pile of freshly dug dirt.
He stumbles to his feet and he doesn’t stop running until he has scaled the steps and he’s in the attic again, locking the door and crawling into a darkened corner, pulling his legs up to his chest.
Henry can’t believe what’s happening; he’s an adult and he must face reality head-on, but tears are pouring from his eyes. He can’t remember ever being more scared than he is in this moment. He sniffles, reaches for his pocket for a tissue that isn’t there.
Downstairs, there’s a loud crash on the first floor. Then there’s another crash. The fierce sounds grow louder and louder, closer and closer.
Henry hopes the attic door will protect him. If the door isn’t enough, he doesn’t think hiding in the darkness will be sufficient, either. But for now, he hides.
THE BIRTH OF THE ARTIST
(8)
When the tracks from the rabbits crossed the snow-covered open area located between the two sides of the forest, Henry knew he should stop and turn back. He could hear the roar of the water under the long and narrow clearing. This was the river, hidden under a blanket of ice and snow.
There was no path, but the rabbit tracks continued downstream, down the middle of the frozen river as if the death didn’t lurk feet or inches below their paws. Henry followed their lead, but he didn’t dare cross the river. Instead he did his best to stay on the snowy bank, but eventually the ground got steeper and steeper and he had to make a choice: go back into the woods or walk on the ice.
Henry couldn’t stop thinking about the rabbits. Were they like the skeleton, just something he had dreamed up and simply imagined was real? How could he have imagined something so amazing, something he had never thought of or seen before? Baseball, football, cops and robbers, army men were all things he had watched on television. Even skeletons were a staple of his cartoons.
The rabbits with the red eyes were different. They had to be real if he had never seen them before. More importantly, he closed his eyes and reopened them a dozen times and the tracks never disappeared.
Henry carefully inched down the snowy back and onto the frozen river, a few small steps at a time. When his feet didn’t break through, he trusted the ice to hold his weight more and more. Soon he was walking down the middle of the river, following the rabbit tracks as if this was just another path in the woods, one that roared liked a thunderstorm under his boots at times. He kept trying to imagine where the rabbits could have come from, and how they moved in sync like that, and why their eyes were red. And, most importantly, where were they going?
Henry was so lost in his thoughts he didn’t hear the faint warning cries beneath him, the sound like glass being shattered in slow motion.
His first indication of the danger was when his right boot pushed through the ice and was grabbed by the frigid water, as if a hand had emerged from below to pull him down.
A shrill cry escaped Henry’s throat. He took a step backwards and then he was sinking and an instant later the world was cold and black and he was struggling under the surface of the river, surrounded by a rushing wall of freezing water.
The current sucked Henry away from the hole he had created in the ice and into the darkness beyond. His eyes were wide and his arms flailed; the co
ldness slithered along his skin, chilling the blood in his veins, squeezing his chest.
Henry kicked his legs and he desperately held his breath as the swift current dragged him along. Vise-like pressure squeezed him from all sides and he couldn’t believe what was happening. He felt trapped in a terrible nightmare.
His heart raced, yet his body was already becoming lethargic and sleepy from the biting cold.
Then, when Henry’s eyes were about to close, when he was on the verge of letting the river carry him away, he smashed into the trunk of a submerged tree.
The pain was tremendous, but even though the water tugged at him with icy claws, the current wasn’t dragging him along anymore and the shock jolted him back awake.
Henry wrapped his arms around the mossy trunk and pulled himself into the slick branches. His lungs were burning and screaming at him.
He looked up in desperation and saw the ice was only inches above him; he extended his arm weakly. His knuckles tapped at the frozen ceiling like he was pushing on solid rock.
He punched again with more force and a crack formed, the lines splintering away from him.
His third punch smashed the ice apart, opening a window into the cool winter sunlight.
Henry pulled himself up the branches and out of the water, sucking in a huge breath the moment he felt the dazzling embrace of the sun. He crawled up the tree toward the uprooted base of the trunk where the roots hung limply, exposed to the elements.
Once over land, Henry dropped to the snowy riverbank, gasping for air and staring into the sky at those dancing clouds. A chill was eating into his bones and he couldn’t stop shivering. His teeth chattered and he bit down on one of his knuckles to make them stop.
Henry lay there in the snow, grateful to see the sky. He watched the clouds through a break in the trees. Exhaustion overwhelmed him. He couldn’t imagine moving again, let alone crossing the river and finding his way home. He wanted to close his eyes and settle into the comfort of the cold darkness.