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There's Something Very Wrong With The Woods Behind My Childhood Home
My mother passed away last week. It all happened quickly. A call from the hospital, followed by me hastily booking the first flight home. It was the sort of trip you don't have the time to pack for. I'd gone to the airport straight from work, and in my anxious rush, didn't even remember to call my wife until I was standing at the gate.
I sat with my mother through her final night. She was lucid in short bursts, her mind surfacing and then falling back into its own depths. I held her hand, and in the moments she was awake, I'd speak to her. Just small things, how much I loved her and how grateful I was to have her as my mother. I was an only child, and my father died when I was still young, so growing up it had really only been the two of us. I'd grown up and moved away for college, where I met my wife, and after we married I'd taken a job in another state, closer to her family and her many siblings, all of whom she was close to. It felt like a simple case of majority rule. But I always felt guilty about the distance. I tried to visit her at least once a year, or to fly her out to see us. More than once, we'd discussed her moving closer. But her whole life had taken course in that small town. She had her friends there, and her memories. And the time got away from us, as it so often does.
On her final morning she seemed almost herself again. Lucid enough that I allowed myself to believe, at least for an hour or so, that she might actually pull through. She was reminiscing. About my childhood, about how happy she'd been despite any troubles we'd had. Raising a kid alone in a house where something was always breaking couldn't have been easy. But she said she wouldn't change a thing. She brought up the summer I turned eleven, when I got my first bike. How excited I was. She'd taught me to ride it herself, and after that I was gone every day until the streetlights came on.
I didn't have many friends back then. I went to a small school, lived on an isolated street on the far side of town, and there were no other kids close enough to play with. But the bike gave me a kind of freedom I hadn't known before, and for a summer, that small town became a miniature world to explore. I'd ride to the convenience store a few miles off for popsicles or candy. I'd cut through the field behind our house and startle up mice and snakes from the tall grass as I went. But my favorite place was the woods. A wide stretch of tall pines about half a mile behind the field, split by a shallow creek at its entrance that winded its way on and off through much of the forest. That was where I found my fort. I always called it mine, though truthfully I'd only found it. It had clearly been there for years before I ever set foot near it, and I never once ran into whoever built it. Or anyone at all, for that matter.
We talked about that old house for a while. I brought up my last memories of my father. And she told me stories from her own childhood, growing up in that same town. I told her, half-joking, that she was lucky to have found her soul mate so close to home, and admitted that as a kid I'd sometimes hated that little town. Hated how small it was, how I used to wish for a friend or two to ride bikes and play in the woods with. To show off my fort to. But I was still happy because of her.
She laughed, and then raised her eyebrow slightly.
"What are you talking about? You spent that whole summer after you got your bike with that one girl. Gosh, what was her name? I'm the one supposed to be losing my mind here."
"Girl?" I asked.
"The little brunette. With freckles? Don't tell me you forgot? You two were practically joined at the hip. You were always eager to get out of the house every morning. To go meet her at your fort."
I thought for a minute, genuinely unable to place the memory. I'd had a handful of friends growing up, sure, but none close enough to my house to ride bikes with. And I had no memory whatsoever of anyone else ever setting foot in that fort with me.
"You don't remember her name? Was she a classmate?" I asked.
"She must have gone to your school, I'd think. Unless she was just visiting that summer. But who visits Pineridge?" She laughed again softly.
I ultimately chalked it up to her state of mind. The doctors had informed me that patients sometimes said strange things before they passed​. She'd murmured something about seeing my father in the room just the night before. We talked a bit longer after that. Then she drifted off.
She didn't wake up again.
She left me the old house.
I drove out that same day to check up on the place. Just to look over what was left, and to bask in old memories for a while. A handful of new houses had gone up nearby in the years since I'd left. The field behind the house that I used to cut through on my bike was now half cut down to make room for new development, which had evidently stallled. The house's lawn had gone wild. But the house itself looked almost exactly as it had when I was a boy.
Despite the familiar appearance, it felt very different inside. Empty in a way it had never felt before. I'd always thought a home held on to some part of the people who lived in it. Some memory or presence. But standing in the entrance, I couldn't feel it. Whatever presence the home had held onto had drifted away with my mother's last breath.
I went to her room and turned on the light. The bulb flickered before it lit, filling the room with the warm orange glow of her old sodium bulbs. She never switched over to the white ones everyone else used now. She said they made every room feel like a waiting area. I went to her dresser. My mother was never the type to hold onto much. She got rid of things the moment they stopped being useful, and was never the sentimental type, as far as I knew. But I guess nostalgia gets to us all a little bit. Tucked in the bottom drawer was a stack of small boxes, each one labeled by decade.
I went through them in order, starting with the most recent. Photos from our visits over the years, mostly. Then my wedding. My college graduation. Birthdays, school trips, the handful of events she'd thought to bring a camera to over the years. And finally, the summer I got my bike. A photo of me standing beside it at my birthday party, which a grand total of two classmates had attended. I was grinning wide while holding up a bike with a glossy red frame and a bow still tied around the handlebars. The best gift I ever got.
I flipped through the rest of that envelope. It was mostly photos from my party. A few of me playing outside that she'd taken candidly. Me riding my bike in the driveway, still looking a bit wobbly.
And then a photo of me, standing next to a girl I didn't know.
Her smile was as wide as mine. She had bushy brown hair, green eyes, and freckles set in threes across each cheek. I stared at it for a moment, then turned it over. James and Emma — June 14th, 1999.
Emma?
I examined it closer. The photo had been taken in our front yard near the driveway. My mom's old station wagon was in the background. On the ground in front of it sat my bike, and beside it, a second one. Purple, with streamers hanging off the handlebars.
I had wanted a friend that whole summer. Apparently I'd had one. And somehow, I had no memory of her at all.
I went back to my old room and dug out my yearbooks, going through them page by page. Elementary, then middle school, then high school, checking every photo and name. Then I skimmed through them a second time, this time remembering to check the signature pages. Most of them were sparse, filled with the same handful of names I already remembered.
Then I found something I didn't remember. Sixth grade. A single signature at the very back of the book, separate from the handful of others.
A short note in careful, looping handwriting: I know we didn't go to school together, but I'm still glad I get to sign your yearbook. It's my first time signing one. I've had a lot of fun this summer. I'm glad we met!
Signed, "Emma." A small smiley face was drawn beside her name.
Straightforward. No last name. No other clues. Just a short message in an old yearbook that left me more unsettled than the photo had.
It nagged at me the rest of that night. I called my wife to talk about my mom and to hear a voice of encouragement, and told her that I'd be staying a few more days to handle the house and the arrangements. I declined when she offered to fly out with the kids. Even during the phone call, I couldn't keep my mind off the girl in the photo. Why had my mother never brought this up before? Not at a single visit, or at any holiday? Never once in all these years? I remembered a specific conversation years ago. My mom was visiting, and I was complaining to my wife about growing up without anyone to ride bikes with. My mom had laughed and blamed it on the town, too small to live close to other kids, too big to ride your bike to them. She never once mentioned a friend.
So why not mention her then? Or any other time before or since?
The only other thing I could remember her mentioning was the fort.
She'd associated it with the girl. With Emma. I hadn't been back there since I was a kid. I wasn't even sure it would still be standing. It had already looked like it could fall apart at any moment decades ago. But it was the only real clue I had.
I didn't bother waiting for morning. I found an old flashlight in the garage, the kind with the fat square battery that you had to slap every now and then to keep on. I told myself that I wanted to get it over with so I didn't have to spend tomorrow dealing with it. That was true, in a sense, but it wasn't the real reason. The real reason was that I didn't think I could sleep with the idea of some phantom memory nagging at me.
The field was smaller now, cut down on one side and replaced with a muddy mess, wooden stakes and half hung string marking out zones for building. But past it, the tree line was the same. Tall pines, standing black against the sky. I walked the half-mile through the field and found myself thinking far more about the snakes, mice, and ticks than I ever did as a kid. I stood at the edge of the woods for a long moment. The creek that used to mark its entrance was now dry. Then I willed myself forward into the darkness of the trees.
I found the remnants of the creek before I found the fort. I heard it first, low and constant, and the sound soothed me somehow. I walked a while, then there it was. Smaller than it looked in my memory and leaning harder to one side than it used to, but still standing. Scrap plywood and two-by-fours nailed to the trunks and branches of an old tree, roofed with a sheet of old tin that was mostly orange with rust.
I don't know what I expected, really. Nothing, probably. I think some part of me was just using this sudden quest as some excuse to avoid thinking about my mother's passing, and the knot that had been in my stomach since I got the call at work. So I wasn't quite prepared when the beam of my flashlight touched the carved letters at the base of the tree.
*J + E*
I put my fingers on it. And for just a fraction of a second, I heard someone laughing. A girl's laugh. Almost as real as if it had been behind my shoulder. It was gone before I could turn around, and when I did turn there was nothing but old pines and the dark baring down between them. My heart was going like I'd run the distance to the fort instead of walked it.
I steeled myself and climbed the ladder to the fort, and went inside. I exhaled in relief that the ladder didn't break under my weight. The floor of the fort was covered by a piece of old carpet, now black with mildew, and half of it had given way to the wood underneath. I shined my flashlight around and stopped on a corner of the fort where the carpet was raised. Tucked beneath a warped board was a small, cut-out section of the floor that had once probably held comic books or cool rocks, or whatever else a boy keeps in a fort. Inside was a tin box. Rusted through on one corner. An old cookie tin, I think. I pried the lid open, having to use more strength than I expected.
Inside were a handful of Polaroids, stuck together at the edges from years of humidity. A few rocks and marbles. A hair tie, faded pink. And a few folded pieces of paper, so brittle I was afraid they would come apart in my hands if I tried to unfold them.
For some reason that I could not quite express, my heart was now pounding even harder than before. I went for the notes first, and unfolded the first.
*James -*
*That was really mean. You didn't talk to me today. I stood right in front of you outside the fort and you didn't look at me at all. You just walked right past me. You didn't even answer me. I pretended I was fine, but I was really sad. Did I do something wrong?*
*Emma*
What startled me more was the response, written directly below on the same sheet of paper.
*To Emma -*
*What are you talking about? When I came to the fort you weren't here. Are you just messing with me? Are you sure you saw me? I thought you had something to do maybe. I'll be here tomorrow at noon. I'll bring lunch!*
*James*
It was my own, childish handwriting scrawled on the paper, but I couldn't recall ever writing it. I couldn't remember any of it. In all of my memories of the fort, I was alone, so how was it that I was now finding impossible evidence of a friend I didn't even remember having? I was almost shaking now, but I unfolded the second note.
*James -*
*I thought you were playing a mean joke on me when you said you didn't see me, but today I went home and my own mom ignored me. I yelled out to her over and over, but she wouldn't turn around. I'm getting really scared. Please meet me here after lunch, okay?*
*Emma*
Below it, my response read:
*I think you're the one messing with me! How could your own mom forget you? Is this part of one of your stories? Well, even if she does forget you, I won't. I promise.*
*James*
My hand shook as I pried open the third note.
*You promised you wouldn't forget me. I know you didn't mean to break that promise. I don't think it's your fault. I think something is happening to me and I don't know why. But it's getting worse. Nobody reacts to me now. I'm going to try something tomorrow. I hope it works. If you're reading this and you don't remember writing anything back, or you don't remember me at all, then I guess it didn't. I'm sorry. I hope you have a good life. I'm really glad we were friends, even if it turns out I'm the only one who remembers.*
*— Emma*
There was no date, but they must have been from that summer. I sat down on the old carpet and read over each note several more times, and each time I got to I guess it didn't work, something in my heart sank a little bit deeper.
I went through the Polaroids next. Most of them had stuck together, or faded beyond saving, but I managed to peel three apart without losing the image. One was the two of us in front of the fort, smiling wide, taken with an outstretched hand. Our arms slung over each other's shoulders like we'd known each other for years. The second was of Emma alone, sitting on a fallen log, not smiling, and looking somewhere off to the side of the camera with an expression I couldn't place. Wary, maybe. Or frightened. Or desperate, to a degree a girl her age shouldn't be.
The third stopped me cold before I even understood why.
It was a poor shot, slightly off-center, half-shadowed, clearly taken in a hurry. But even blurred and dark, I recognized it instantly, and the fact that I actually recognized it hit me even harder than the other two photos had. A black shape, low to the ground, half-swallowed by dirt and pine needles. I hadn't consciously remembered it yet. I don't think I'd let myself. But something in my chest reacted to it before my mind caught up, like flinching at a sound you don't yet know the source of.
I looked at where Emma was looking in the second photo.
She was looking toward it too.
Fragments were surfacing like a half-remembered dream. But it was coming to me now, faster than it had with anything else in that box.
There was a place in these woods, deeper in, past where the creek split. That was where the shape in the photo was. I remembered finding it on one of my first ventures into the woods as a boy, standing at a certain distance from it. Always at a distance. Like there was a line drawn in the dirt that I couldn't see, and feeling something with no apparent source press against my chest. A strange pressure. Sort of like the pressure in your ears on an airplane but all over.
I remembered the lights, too. Small and indistinct, hovering at the edge of my vision every time I went near that place. Like blue fireflies blinking in and out. I could never see them when I looked at them straight on, and recalled that I didn't like to try. They were only in the corners of my eyes, and gone the instant I turned to face them. I always had an excuse for seeing them. I told myself that it was the sun through the leaves. Or some unique species of fireflies that blinked blue, if it happened at dusk. When I had no other explanation, it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. But I remembered being very sure of those explanations, mainly because I found any alternative uncomfortable.
I went to find it again.
It took me several attempts. I followed the thinning creek, then got turned around, then tried once more from where the water split east. On the third try, I found it, tucked into a small hollow in the trees exactly as the old photo showed it. Except no photograph or half-memory had prepared me for actually standing in front of it again.
It didn't look like a rock, really. Whatever this was, it didn't rest in the ground like an inanimate object placed there by nature and happenstance. It sat in the earth as though erected, angled at a slight lean like my​ old fort. Its dark black blinked with a strange, glassy blue where my flashlight caught it, its surfaces flat in places and strangely warped in others. It was like something built rather than naturally formed, then half-buried by someone in a hurry. The strange symbols cut into its face didn't seem to sit still under the light. It wasn't that they moved, exactly. Rather, my eyes couldn't seem to hold onto them. Every time I thought I had the shape of one memorized, I'd blink and lose it, and have to start over from another symbol.
I stood near the treeline, a distance from it. That same old pressure was already beginning to press upon my chest, unmistakably the same feeling. There was a ringing in my head that made my spine shudder, like a bell had gone off inside my skull.
I stood there for a long moment, telling myself I only wanted to look. That whatever this thing was, perhaps it was dangerous. Radioactive material somehow incorrectly disposed of, perhaps. I just needed to see it, confirm it was real, then leave.
But as I stood looking at it, I noticed the lights again. In the corners of my eyes. But something was different this time. Maybe because a part of me was already looking for them. Or maybe because I was closer to the thing than I'd ever willingly been as a boy. This time, they didn't scatter the way they used to the instant I turned my head. They remained. Three of them, near the base of the stone. And for the first time in my life, I let myself actually look.
They weren't lights. Or they weren't just lights. They had a form to them. The suggestion of shoulders, of arms, of something like a head, swaying back and forth. Flickering in and out like an old television, there and then not there then there again, never quite solid enough to call solid, but not quite vague enough to call a ghost. One of them lifted what might have been a hand. It reached out toward me slowly, then stopped, like I was just out of its grasp. There was nothing threatening in the motion. In fact, it looked less like a threat and more like a plea.
As the ringing in my head spread and then consumed me, I remembered all at once exactly why I never used to look at them directly. It wasn't fear of them alone. It was something closer to the feeling of standing on the shore and watching someone out past the buoys as they drowned. A specific, gnawing helplessness of being looked at pleadlingly by something that is desperate for help, and knowing that swimming out to their aid would only drown the both of you.
I made myself stay where I was as the ringing washed over me. Not taking a step forward or back. I just stood at that invisible line, close enough to feel the pressure thickening in my chest, close enough to watch the shapes flicker at the edge of the stone. And I let the memories come.
It was as though the pressure emanating from this strange, half-buried pillar in the ground was returning something that was long lost to me. I remembered riding my bike one day, and meeting Emma. She was also riding her bike through the field from the neighborhood on the other side of the forest that stood as the boundary my mother had set for me. I remembered hitting it off with her at once, and her asking to ride bikes with me. I remembered showing her my fort, despite her being nervous to enter the forest at first, and me at first wondering if I should reveal my greatest secret to someone I'd only just met. I remembered days of adventure, of fun and laughter, of make-believe and games. Of notes written to each other and picnics and catching fireflies and telling stories.
And then I remembered bringing Emma here. Showing the strange monument to her like it was a curiosity. Something I was both proud of and afraid of in equal measure. I remembered telling her I never went past a certain point. I remembered her laughing. *It's just a rock, James.* Then walking toward it anyway, her face going pale and strange the closer she got, like she wasn't entirely choosing her own steps anymore. I remembered her hand reaching out, and the way the air seemed to pop like an overinflated balloon the instant her fingers touched the surface. Less a sound and more a change in pressure. I remembered her sudden shriek that soon turned into a whimper. And then I remembered my panic, my rushing forward to grab her other arm and hauling her back so hard we both went down in the dirt behind the invisible line. And I remembered her running off afterward and not returning for the rest of the day.
I don't know how I'd forgotten, or why I was so afraid of her touching that pillar back then. It was almost instinctive. The same aversion I felt to it now. I don't know why I never told my mother. Or had I?
What I instinctively understood now, standing there with that shape still reaching toward me from beside the stone, was what Emma's last note had actually meant. *I'm going to try something tomorrow.* She'd been talking about coming back here. Alone, this time. Touching it once more, perhaps believing that if the stone had done this to her, the stone could undo it too.
I didn't wait to see if the shape's hand would ever close the distance between us. I stepped back, then further back, until the pressure in my chest began to fade along with the ringing in my head, and the shapes at the base of the stone went still, then dim, and finally disappeared.
I did not look back at it again. I walked out of that clearing as fast as I could, and I did not stop until I could see the streetlights of the new development through the trees.
The next morning, I sat on the front porch waiting for my ride back to the airport. I had decided to leave early. I needed to return to some sense of normalcy. I could make the arrangements for my mother's funeral over the phone, and return with my wife when I was more mentally stable. A part of me believed the events of last night to be some cruel hallucination, spurred on by grief and exhaustion.
I retrieved my phone from my pocket. I needed to hear my wife's voice. To tell her I'd be heading home soon, back later that day if there were no delays. I wanted to hear her reassurance. To distract me from the sadness I still felt, and the confusion of memories I'd forgotten. I wanted to hear the kids over the phone before they were off to school.
She picked up on the third ring.
"Hello?"
"Hi, honey," I said.
There was a pause on the line, after that.
"Honey?" I asked once more, unsure if we'd disconnected.
Then I heard her voice.
"...Who is this?"
#entertainment
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My mother passed away last week. It all happened quickly. A call from the hospital, followed by me hastily booking the first flight home. It was the sort of trip you don't have the time to pack for. I'd gone to the airport straight from work, and in my anxious rush, didn't even remember to call my wife until I was standing at the gate.
I sat with my mother through her final night. She was lucid in short bursts, her mind surfacing and then falling back into its own depths. I held her hand, and in the moments she was awake, I'd speak to her. Just small things, how much I loved her and how grateful I was to have her as my mother. I was an only child, and my father died when I was still young, so growing up it had really only been the two of us. I'd grown up and moved away for college, where I met my wife, and after we married I'd taken a job in another state, closer to her family and her many siblings, all of whom she was close to. It felt like a simple case of majority rule. But I always felt guilty about the distance. I tried to visit her at least once a year, or to fly her out to see us. More than once, we'd discussed her moving closer. But her whole life had taken course in that small town. She had her friends there, and her memories. And the time got away from us, as it so often does.
On her final morning she seemed almost herself again. Lucid enough that I allowed myself to believe, at least for an hour or so, that she might actually pull through. She was reminiscing. About my childhood, about how happy she'd been despite any troubles we'd had. Raising a kid alone in a house where something was always breaking couldn't have been easy. But she said she wouldn't change a thing. She brought up the summer I turned eleven, when I got my first bike. How excited I was. She'd taught me to ride it herself, and after that I was gone every day until the streetlights came on.
I didn't have many friends back then. I went to a small school, lived on an isolated street on the far side of town, and there were no other kids close enough to play with. But the bike gave me a kind of freedom I hadn't known before, and for a summer, that small town became a miniature world to explore. I'd ride to the convenience store a few miles off for popsicles or candy. I'd cut through the field behind our house and startle up mice and snakes from the tall grass as I went. But my favorite place was the woods. A wide stretch of tall pines about half a mile behind the field, split by a shallow creek at its entrance that winded its way on and off through much of the forest. That was where I found my fort. I always called it mine, though truthfully I'd only found it. It had clearly been there for years before I ever set foot near it, and I never once ran into whoever built it. Or anyone at all, for that matter.
We talked about that old house for a while. I brought up my last memories of my father. And she told me stories from her own childhood, growing up in that same town. I told her, half-joking, that she was lucky to have found her soul mate so close to home, and admitted that as a kid I'd sometimes hated that little town. Hated how small it was, how I used to wish for a friend or two to ride bikes and play in the woods with. To show off my fort to. But I was still happy because of her.
She laughed, and then raised her eyebrow slightly.
"What are you talking about? You spent that whole summer after you got your bike with that one girl. Gosh, what was her name? I'm the one supposed to be losing my mind here."
"Girl?" I asked.
"The little brunette. With freckles? Don't tell me you forgot? You two were practically joined at the hip. You were always eager to get out of the house every morning. To go meet her at your fort."
I thought for a minute, genuinely unable to place the memory. I'd had a handful of friends growing up, sure, but none close enough to my house to ride bikes with. And I had no memory whatsoever of anyone else ever setting foot in that fort with me.
"You don't remember her name? Was she a classmate?" I asked.
"She must have gone to your school, I'd think. Unless she was just visiting that summer. But who visits Pineridge?" She laughed again softly.
I ultimately chalked it up to her state of mind. The doctors had informed me that patients sometimes said strange things before they passed​. She'd murmured something about seeing my father in the room just the night before. We talked a bit longer after that. Then she drifted off.
She didn't wake up again.
She left me the old house.
I drove out that same day to check up on the place. Just to look over what was left, and to bask in old memories for a while. A handful of new houses had gone up nearby in the years since I'd left. The field behind the house that I used to cut through on my bike was now half cut down to make room for new development, which had evidently stallled. The house's lawn had gone wild. But the house itself looked almost exactly as it had when I was a boy.
Despite the familiar appearance, it felt very different inside. Empty in a way it had never felt before. I'd always thought a home held on to some part of the people who lived in it. Some memory or presence. But standing in the entrance, I couldn't feel it. Whatever presence the home had held onto had drifted away with my mother's last breath.
I went to her room and turned on the light. The bulb flickered before it lit, filling the room with the warm orange glow of her old sodium bulbs. She never switched over to the white ones everyone else used now. She said they made every room feel like a waiting area. I went to her dresser. My mother was never the type to hold onto much. She got rid of things the moment they stopped being useful, and was never the sentimental type, as far as I knew. But I guess nostalgia gets to us all a little bit. Tucked in the bottom drawer was a stack of small boxes, each one labeled by decade.
I went through them in order, starting with the most recent. Photos from our visits over the years, mostly. Then my wedding. My college graduation. Birthdays, school trips, the handful of events she'd thought to bring a camera to over the years. And finally, the summer I got my bike. A photo of me standing beside it at my birthday party, which a grand total of two classmates had attended. I was grinning wide while holding up a bike with a glossy red frame and a bow still tied around the handlebars. The best gift I ever got.
I flipped through the rest of that envelope. It was mostly photos from my party. A few of me playing outside that she'd taken candidly. Me riding my bike in the driveway, still looking a bit wobbly.
And then a photo of me, standing next to a girl I didn't know.
Her smile was as wide as mine. She had bushy brown hair, green eyes, and freckles set in threes across each cheek. I stared at it for a moment, then turned it over. James and Emma — June 14th, 1999.
Emma?
I examined it closer. The photo had been taken in our front yard near the driveway. My mom's old station wagon was in the background. On the ground in front of it sat my bike, and beside it, a second one. Purple, with streamers hanging off the handlebars.
I had wanted a friend that whole summer. Apparently I'd had one. And somehow, I had no memory of her at all.
I went back to my old room and dug out my yearbooks, going through them page by page. Elementary, then middle school, then high school, checking every photo and name. Then I skimmed through them a second time, this time remembering to check the signature pages. Most of them were sparse, filled with the same handful of names I already remembered.
Then I found something I didn't remember. Sixth grade. A single signature at the very back of the book, separate from the handful of others.
A short note in careful, looping handwriting: I know we didn't go to school together, but I'm still glad I get to sign your yearbook. It's my first time signing one. I've had a lot of fun this summer. I'm glad we met!
Signed, "Emma." A small smiley face was drawn beside her name.
Straightforward. No last name. No other clues. Just a short message in an old yearbook that left me more unsettled than the photo had.
It nagged at me the rest of that night. I called my wife to talk about my mom and to hear a voice of encouragement, and told her that I'd be staying a few more days to handle the house and the arrangements. I declined when she offered to fly out with the kids. Even during the phone call, I couldn't keep my mind off the girl in the photo. Why had my mother never brought this up before? Not at a single visit, or at any holiday? Never once in all these years? I remembered a specific conversation years ago. My mom was visiting, and I was complaining to my wife about growing up without anyone to ride bikes with. My mom had laughed and blamed it on the town, too small to live close to other kids, too big to ride your bike to them. She never once mentioned a friend.
So why not mention her then? Or any other time before or since?
The only other thing I could remember her mentioning was the fort.
She'd associated it with the girl. With Emma. I hadn't been back there since I was a kid. I wasn't even sure it would still be standing. It had already looked like it could fall apart at any moment decades ago. But it was the only real clue I had.
I didn't bother waiting for morning. I found an old flashlight in the garage, the kind with the fat square battery that you had to slap every now and then to keep on. I told myself that I wanted to get it over with so I didn't have to spend tomorrow dealing with it. That was true, in a sense, but it wasn't the real reason. The real reason was that I didn't think I could sleep with the idea of some phantom memory nagging at me.
The field was smaller now, cut down on one side and replaced with a muddy mess, wooden stakes and half hung string marking out zones for building. But past it, the tree line was the same. Tall pines, standing black against the sky. I walked the half-mile through the field and found myself thinking far more about the snakes, mice, and ticks than I ever did as a kid. I stood at the edge of the woods for a long moment. The creek that used to mark its entrance was now dry. Then I willed myself forward into the darkness of the trees.
I found the remnants of the creek before I found the fort. I heard it first, low and constant, and the sound soothed me somehow. I walked a while, then there it was. Smaller than it looked in my memory and leaning harder to one side than it used to, but still standing. Scrap plywood and two-by-fours nailed to the trunks and branches of an old tree, roofed with a sheet of old tin that was mostly orange with rust.
I don't know what I expected, really. Nothing, probably. I think some part of me was just using this sudden quest as some excuse to avoid thinking about my mother's passing, and the knot that had been in my stomach since I got the call at work. So I wasn't quite prepared when the beam of my flashlight touched the carved letters at the base of the tree.
*J + E*
I put my fingers on it. And for just a fraction of a second, I heard someone laughing. A girl's laugh. Almost as real as if it had been behind my shoulder. It was gone before I could turn around, and when I did turn there was nothing but old pines and the dark baring down between them. My heart was going like I'd run the distance to the fort instead of walked it.
I steeled myself and climbed the ladder to the fort, and went inside. I exhaled in relief that the ladder didn't break under my weight. The floor of the fort was covered by a piece of old carpet, now black with mildew, and half of it had given way to the wood underneath. I shined my flashlight around and stopped on a corner of the fort where the carpet was raised. Tucked beneath a warped board was a small, cut-out section of the floor that had once probably held comic books or cool rocks, or whatever else a boy keeps in a fort. Inside was a tin box. Rusted through on one corner. An old cookie tin, I think. I pried the lid open, having to use more strength than I expected.
Inside were a handful of Polaroids, stuck together at the edges from years of humidity. A few rocks and marbles. A hair tie, faded pink. And a few folded pieces of paper, so brittle I was afraid they would come apart in my hands if I tried to unfold them.
For some reason that I could not quite express, my heart was now pounding even harder than before. I went for the notes first, and unfolded the first.
*James -*
*That was really mean. You didn't talk to me today. I stood right in front of you outside the fort and you didn't look at me at all. You just walked right past me. You didn't even answer me. I pretended I was fine, but I was really sad. Did I do something wrong?*
*Emma*
What startled me more was the response, written directly below on the same sheet of paper.
*To Emma -*
*What are you talking about? When I came to the fort you weren't here. Are you just messing with me? Are you sure you saw me? I thought you had something to do maybe. I'll be here tomorrow at noon. I'll bring lunch!*
*James*
It was my own, childish handwriting scrawled on the paper, but I couldn't recall ever writing it. I couldn't remember any of it. In all of my memories of the fort, I was alone, so how was it that I was now finding impossible evidence of a friend I didn't even remember having? I was almost shaking now, but I unfolded the second note.
*James -*
*I thought you were playing a mean joke on me when you said you didn't see me, but today I went home and my own mom ignored me. I yelled out to her over and over, but she wouldn't turn around. I'm getting really scared. Please meet me here after lunch, okay?*
*Emma*
Below it, my response read:
*I think you're the one messing with me! How could your own mom forget you? Is this part of one of your stories? Well, even if she does forget you, I won't. I promise.*
*James*
My hand shook as I pried open the third note.
*You promised you wouldn't forget me. I know you didn't mean to break that promise. I don't think it's your fault. I think something is happening to me and I don't know why. But it's getting worse. Nobody reacts to me now. I'm going to try something tomorrow. I hope it works. If you're reading this and you don't remember writing anything back, or you don't remember me at all, then I guess it didn't. I'm sorry. I hope you have a good life. I'm really glad we were friends, even if it turns out I'm the only one who remembers.*
*— Emma*
There was no date, but they must have been from that summer. I sat down on the old carpet and read over each note several more times, and each time I got to I guess it didn't work, something in my heart sank a little bit deeper.
I went through the Polaroids next. Most of them had stuck together, or faded beyond saving, but I managed to peel three apart without losing the image. One was the two of us in front of the fort, smiling wide, taken with an outstretched hand. Our arms slung over each other's shoulders like we'd known each other for years. The second was of Emma alone, sitting on a fallen log, not smiling, and looking somewhere off to the side of the camera with an expression I couldn't place. Wary, maybe. Or frightened. Or desperate, to a degree a girl her age shouldn't be.
The third stopped me cold before I even understood why.
It was a poor shot, slightly off-center, half-shadowed, clearly taken in a hurry. But even blurred and dark, I recognized it instantly, and the fact that I actually recognized it hit me even harder than the other two photos had. A black shape, low to the ground, half-swallowed by dirt and pine needles. I hadn't consciously remembered it yet. I don't think I'd let myself. But something in my chest reacted to it before my mind caught up, like flinching at a sound you don't yet know the source of.
I looked at where Emma was looking in the second photo.
She was looking toward it too.
Fragments were surfacing like a half-remembered dream. But it was coming to me now, faster than it had with anything else in that box.
There was a place in these woods, deeper in, past where the creek split. That was where the shape in the photo was. I remembered finding it on one of my first ventures into the woods as a boy, standing at a certain distance from it. Always at a distance. Like there was a line drawn in the dirt that I couldn't see, and feeling something with no apparent source press against my chest. A strange pressure. Sort of like the pressure in your ears on an airplane but all over.
I remembered the lights, too. Small and indistinct, hovering at the edge of my vision every time I went near that place. Like blue fireflies blinking in and out. I could never see them when I looked at them straight on, and recalled that I didn't like to try. They were only in the corners of my eyes, and gone the instant I turned to face them. I always had an excuse for seeing them. I told myself that it was the sun through the leaves. Or some unique species of fireflies that blinked blue, if it happened at dusk. When I had no other explanation, it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. But I remembered being very sure of those explanations, mainly because I found any alternative uncomfortable.
I went to find it again.
It took me several attempts. I followed the thinning creek, then got turned around, then tried once more from where the water split east. On the third try, I found it, tucked into a small hollow in the trees exactly as the old photo showed it. Except no photograph or half-memory had prepared me for actually standing in front of it again.
It didn't look like a rock, really. Whatever this was, it didn't rest in the ground like an inanimate object placed there by nature and happenstance. It sat in the earth as though erected, angled at a slight lean like my​ old fort. Its dark black blinked with a strange, glassy blue where my flashlight caught it, its surfaces flat in places and strangely warped in others. It was like something built rather than naturally formed, then half-buried by someone in a hurry. The strange symbols cut into its face didn't seem to sit still under the light. It wasn't that they moved, exactly. Rather, my eyes couldn't seem to hold onto them. Every time I thought I had the shape of one memorized, I'd blink and lose it, and have to start over from another symbol.
I stood near the treeline, a distance from it. That same old pressure was already beginning to press upon my chest, unmistakably the same feeling. There was a ringing in my head that made my spine shudder, like a bell had gone off inside my skull.
I stood there for a long moment, telling myself I only wanted to look. That whatever this thing was, perhaps it was dangerous. Radioactive material somehow incorrectly disposed of, perhaps. I just needed to see it, confirm it was real, then leave.
But as I stood looking at it, I noticed the lights again. In the corners of my eyes. But something was different this time. Maybe because a part of me was already looking for them. Or maybe because I was closer to the thing than I'd ever willingly been as a boy. This time, they didn't scatter the way they used to the instant I turned my head. They remained. Three of them, near the base of the stone. And for the first time in my life, I let myself actually look.
They weren't lights. Or they weren't just lights. They had a form to them. The suggestion of shoulders, of arms, of something like a head, swaying back and forth. Flickering in and out like an old television, there and then not there then there again, never quite solid enough to call solid, but not quite vague enough to call a ghost. One of them lifted what might have been a hand. It reached out toward me slowly, then stopped, like I was just out of its grasp. There was nothing threatening in the motion. In fact, it looked less like a threat and more like a plea.
As the ringing in my head spread and then consumed me, I remembered all at once exactly why I never used to look at them directly. It wasn't fear of them alone. It was something closer to the feeling of standing on the shore and watching someone out past the buoys as they drowned. A specific, gnawing helplessness of being looked at pleadlingly by something that is desperate for help, and knowing that swimming out to their aid would only drown the both of you.
I made myself stay where I was as the ringing washed over me. Not taking a step forward or back. I just stood at that invisible line, close enough to feel the pressure thickening in my chest, close enough to watch the shapes flicker at the edge of the stone. And I let the memories come.
It was as though the pressure emanating from this strange, half-buried pillar in the ground was returning something that was long lost to me. I remembered riding my bike one day, and meeting Emma. She was also riding her bike through the field from the neighborhood on the other side of the forest that stood as the boundary my mother had set for me. I remembered hitting it off with her at once, and her asking to ride bikes with me. I remembered showing her my fort, despite her being nervous to enter the forest at first, and me at first wondering if I should reveal my greatest secret to someone I'd only just met. I remembered days of adventure, of fun and laughter, of make-believe and games. Of notes written to each other and picnics and catching fireflies and telling stories.
And then I remembered bringing Emma here. Showing the strange monument to her like it was a curiosity. Something I was both proud of and afraid of in equal measure. I remembered telling her I never went past a certain point. I remembered her laughing. *It's just a rock, James.* Then walking toward it anyway, her face going pale and strange the closer she got, like she wasn't entirely choosing her own steps anymore. I remembered her hand reaching out, and the way the air seemed to pop like an overinflated balloon the instant her fingers touched the surface. Less a sound and more a change in pressure. I remembered her sudden shriek that soon turned into a whimper. And then I remembered my panic, my rushing forward to grab her other arm and hauling her back so hard we both went down in the dirt behind the invisible line. And I remembered her running off afterward and not returning for the rest of the day.
I don't know how I'd forgotten, or why I was so afraid of her touching that pillar back then. It was almost instinctive. The same aversion I felt to it now. I don't know why I never told my mother. Or had I?
What I instinctively understood now, standing there with that shape still reaching toward me from beside the stone, was what Emma's last note had actually meant. *I'm going to try something tomorrow.* She'd been talking about coming back here. Alone, this time. Touching it once more, perhaps believing that if the stone had done this to her, the stone could undo it too.
I didn't wait to see if the shape's hand would ever close the distance between us. I stepped back, then further back, until the pressure in my chest began to fade along with the ringing in my head, and the shapes at the base of the stone went still, then dim, and finally disappeared.
I did not look back at it again. I walked out of that clearing as fast as I could, and I did not stop until I could see the streetlights of the new development through the trees.
The next morning, I sat on the front porch waiting for my ride back to the airport. I had decided to leave early. I needed to return to some sense of normalcy. I could make the arrangements for my mother's funeral over the phone, and return with my wife when I was more mentally stable. A part of me believed the events of last night to be some cruel hallucination, spurred on by grief and exhaustion.
I retrieved my phone from my pocket. I needed to hear my wife's voice. To tell her I'd be heading home soon, back later that day if there were no delays. I wanted to hear her reassurance. To distract me from the sadness I still felt, and the confusion of memories I'd forgotten. I wanted to hear the kids over the phone before they were off to school.
She picked up on the third ring.
"Hello?"
"Hi, honey," I said.
There was a pause on the line, after that.
"Honey?" I asked once more, unsure if we'd disconnected.
Then I heard her voice.
"...Who is this?"
#entertainment
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