The night is cold about me, oppressively cold. The very air itself cuts me like a crystal pressed hard, edge-wise against my skin. My cheeks are red and raw, I can feel the heat of my own blood pulsing through the tender skin like a geological event. My mind briefly conjures up an image of red-hot magma rising to the surface, pressing ever upwards before it erupts in a ruddy glow to splatter against the night sky. My cheeks heat at the thought. Shivering, I huddle down into my cloak, hands pressed deep into the pockets and my collar drawn tight about my throat. I draw my head downwards into the wooly folds of my scarf in an attempt to fight the chill. With a quick glance about me I step off the path and into the shadowed park, a shortcut I'm willing to take only to speed my return home and a retreat into the welcoming warmth.
As soon as I step through the decorative arch, all pseudo-victorian columns and cast-concrete grandeur, and into the park itself, before I even have a chance to note the city lights and sounds muffled behind the trees that line the boundary, a strong sense of displacement hits me. The park is utterly still and silent, and dark. So dark that the pools of light that dwell underneath each lamp high above the path seem sullen and scared themselves, almost as if the light is even frightened to shine here. I've taken only a few steps and already I feel like I'm in a different world. The bustling city is easily forgotten, even the high office buildings are lost, hidden behind the towering pines that line the park, only the faintest orange glow, as of a distant fire, indicates that anything lies outside this place. The trees that crowd the path, a random mix of deciduous trees that scratch at the sky with their ragged fingers and wooly pines and furs that muffle sound and light alike, could extend forever, limitless to the horizon and beyond. Some small instinctive part of me shudders under the realisation of my own smallness in this dark place.
Snow crunches underfoot and gathers on the boughs of the trees as I walk with false bravado from light to light, each step an effort of will and determination fighting against the sub-human fear I suddenly and irrationally feel. My sister always called me stubborn, and now the fleeting thought races through my mind, "Will I ever see her again?"
What silliness is this? What fancies dart through my mind? I am in a city! A city full of busy people and emergency services, law and order and happiness ... and chaos. That thought intrudes on my consciousness like an unwelcome guest at a wedding, and a subtle discomfort settles in the pit of my stomach. I look for the reassuring light of the city behind the trees and strain my eyes into the darkness. I'm almost night-blind in the glare of the lamplight above me, but something stops me from stepping out into the black to clear my vision. The city eludes me, and against a quiet voice of panic I stop to listen. I hear ....
I hear nothing but the wind gently slipping from tree to tree, tickling the boughs with gentle fingers, the occasional creak of a branch moving under the weight of snow, a trickle of powder falling from a pine, the distant soft collapse of a snow drift from an overhead branch. The night is utterly silent of the sounds of civilisation, no street sounds, no horns or voices raised in anger, no whistles as pedestrians call for taxis on this frozen night seeking a quick ride home through the cold. Nothing to indicate there is a city there at all. Above me, the sky expands like a black blanket pricked through with holes, the light of heaven penetrates to shine in shimmering twinkles at me, more stars than I ever remember seeing before. I feel transported... and alone, exposed, and gods-damn-it, cold!
I shake myself from this ridiculous immobilising mood and continue my walk home, my breath frosting before me and my feet crunching through the light crust of snow that slicks the path and obscures it.
I'm navigating only by the lamplights now, vivid white islands of glaring brightness in the dark. The path is completely invisible, the city's snow plows wouldn't come in here and obviously the park rangers have found other things to do over these past few unseasonably cold days than clearing the light falls of snow from the paths. No other footprints mar the pristine soft surface before me, while behind me my footsteps look like vandalism, defacing natures beauty. I crunch onwards, and the repetitiveness of my steps lulls me into a slow complacency.
The crisp smell of the night air tweaks my nostrils and my feet trudge through the shallow drifts for what seems like an eternity, all sense of warmth fled, all sense of the city gone. I am alone here in the primordial forest, haunted by my fears and scurrying hurriedly from pool of light to pool of light through the night. My thoughts slow and my breath eases as I settle into the simple motion of walking, huddled deep in my cloak against the cold. The crisp snap of my footsteps breaking through the snow echoes in my ears. It is almost hypnotic.
A furtive movement, caught only in the extreme corner of my vision jerks me rudely out of my reverie. The icy spell of the evening air shatters like the thin crust of protective ice over a frozen lake, plunging me into the sapping waters of terror beneath. I saw something! I find myself stranded between streetlights, the safety of the path suddenly revealed to be illusory, a fantasy my civilised mind has been lulled into believing by the predators that await outside my shallow field of vision. Before I have any chance to get ahold of my galloping heart and shredded nerves, it is I who is galloping forward, blessedly few steps before I'm once again swaddled in the comforting yellow illumination of the lamplight. My breath comes hard, bright billows of steam that retreat from me at speed with the forcefulness of my gasps. It takes several seconds before I can regain any semblance of control, my hands on my knees as I shake.
Nothing happens, such empty fathoms of nothing that I am once again convinced of my safety, here in this frigid wilderness sheltered in the beating heart of the city. What fancy could reach me here? What night-terror could grasp me with its brittle claws in this civilised and manufactured place? Nothing! Nothing is there, perhaps a squirrel, darting swiftly from one bole to another, laden down with the meat of a nut, clutched tightly between tiny hands.
Do squirrels run along the ground then, and grow to the size of miniature ponies then? - my trembling mind asks, Do they run with fang and claw, so long and sharp that the passage of their talons and teeth bring a whistle from the air as they lunge inwards for the kill?
"It's a chilly night for a walk alone isn't it?"
The voice was rich and deep, and impossible. I was alone...
Not anymore, a stranger stood there, and as I twist my head to look towards the source of the voice he seems to ooze into existence, a movement totally unlike walking, but more like a time-lapse film of a fungus growing, but quick, impossibly quick, swelling and reaching up from the ground like some giant mushroom, unfolding spore laden folds and involuted petals until it resolved into the figure standing before me. All this is the vaguest impression before my panic-wide pupils focus on his form.
He is ... unutterably strange.
Boots that had seen better days, torn and faded beneath a thick layer of clinging mud and slime, out of place in the pristine white of the snow-covered park. Trousers of some indeterminate brown material that fell in lank tatters from limbs visible only as lumpish and deformed corded dark brown masses of root-like muscle. The kind of lean and wiry muscle that you could imagine working beneath the smooth black hide of the panther just before it leaps. A shirt of tattered and stained forest brown and some undetermined fabric that gently wafted back and forth in the chill breeze over an emaciated frame of bone and muscle. His arms were bare, but remarkably hairy, covered in a short pale brown pelt so thick and short it looks like the matted roots of a plains grass leaving only his hands clear, fine veins and sinew wrapping his long fine fingers in tendrils, vine-like patterns underneath pale skin. Atop broad shoulders was a strong jaw and neck, covered in a ragged and badly cropped beard and long haggard brown hair that falls from a broad brow to shroud the strong face and intense eyes that burn like yellow coals from behind a heavy forehead. Despite his strangeness he casts a remarkably charismatic figure as he leans there against a sallow pine, just beyond the reach of the lamp's light.
Charismatic or not, I ran.
Head down, arms pumping, some primal fear envelops me. The mouse before the tomcat, I ran until my lungs sear with every breath, my limbs flapping leaden at my sides, my cloak a streaming shadow behind me. I ran until the adrenaline slowly seeps from my cells and the night seems clear about me, a long line of my own wide-gaited footprints crashed haphazard in the snow behind me. Gasping, I reel under a lamp-post, its wan light barely enough to illuminate my upturned face as I suck frozen air into my lungs and try to will the panic under, submerge the screaming instinct of Prey! Prey! Predator! Run! Run! into a sublimated and civilised consideration of the world. The night air burns as it assaults my throat and my lungs heave in protest, an asthmatic feeling of oxygen deprivation adding to my panic. I drop exhausted to my knees, my mittened hands deep in the soft snow drift around the base of the lamp.
"Only the unwise walk alone, and you are most unwise..."
That same flickering half-seen motion and he stands there, now just inside the pitiful ring of light in which I kneel, so close I could reach out and touch his leg with an outstretched hand and half a step. I can smell him, a sweet, fetid, fungal smell that brings memories of compost and dead things fluttering around the back of my mind. I can do nothing but moan as I reel back to sag at the base of the lamp. The cold metal freezes the sweat in my hair, my cap lost somewhere in my mad dash through the park, little tugging sensations as my frozen hair breaks free as I shiver. It is not the cold that makes me shake so, it is some unreasoning fear, some instinctive terror that makes me cringe back from his reaching hand. It is with a strangely disjoint dichotomy of vision that I realise several things at once. The stone arch that looms over his back, this strange man in the earthy smelling clothes and velvet covered skin, that stone arch is the exit from the city park back into the city proper, and through its dark outline I can see streetlights and tail lights and car exhaust fogging the night and the light that shines brightly through the door of the cathedral across the road. I notice that the hand that is reaching towards me has strangely long nails on each of the six fingers that stretch towards me, nails under which dirt gathers and what seems like splinters of wood. Finally I notice that no footprints lead to where he stands, no footprints, but long drawn slithering ruts in the snow, as if long roots had recently collapsed beneath the crust like deflated veins in a long-dead corpse.
I draw back further against the lamp-post, shivering in cold and fear, and look up at the face leering over me.
"Come out of the light my unwise child, come into the embrace of the dark. Are you not exhausted? Are you not tired?"
Yellow eyes bore into mine, the force of his will pressing against my own like an inexhaustible tide pressing against a soft child’s sand-castle on the low slope of the beach, my resistance crumbling like so much dried sugar. They glowed, those eyes, they glowed with the foxfire glow of marsh gas, and corpse-lights, and the glimmerings seen on sailing ship rigging on the dry winter's nights in the arctic. He opens his mouth and a part of me watches as his tongue writhes there, not a tongue but a ropey mess like a bundle of roots, writhing and twisting against each other in the dark recesses of his mouth, movement barely seen but somehow felt. His mouth opens wider and something emerges, something that combines the morbid fleshiness of an eel and the brittle root structure of a tree or a fungus, tender roots questing wetly in the bitter air as it stretches towards me. A last dieing spark of defiance leaps in my breast and I kick upwards with one booted foot as forcefully as I am able, connecting solidly with his chin, slamming that foul and beckoning mouth closed with a crunch like twigs underfoot and sending him backwards on his heels. As I lurch to my feet and sprint past his recumbent form I see not a look of pain on his face, but a look of glee, like a predator loosed on the hunt after the fleet-footed prey, the race is joined.
Screaming like a banshee I run, run as hard as my frantically beating heart will support, I fly across the snow like I am on skis, feet beating the ground so hard that I barely break the icy crust before I am lifting my foot for the next desperate stride. My exhaustion of only a few seconds ago banished by some final last desperate jolt of energy. I imagine myself a mouse running, terrified, squeaking, across the floorboards as the hungry cat hangs in the air, mid-leap, seemingly suspended against gravity's law, aimed perfectly to land where I will be in mere seconds, but I run on, running blindly regardless, towards certain doom.
I spare a gasp to glance behind me and what I see there spurs me to make a final jerking leap towards safety, rolling, tumbling and sliding through the gateway and onto the city street to come fetching up against the postbox on the very edge of the curb. For glancing backwards in my wild flight I saw not a man, but they merest hint of a man, head thrown back and mouth wide in a silent scream, eyes glaring balefully at me as they glowed in their cavernous sockets, arms thrown down to the sides where they dissolved into a ropey length of roots and tendrils before burrowing into the ground. His, its, legs had all but vanished to be replaced with a single fleshy trunk like a giant mushroom, pale and nodding in the moonlight, its broad shoulders tattered and loose like an aged toadstool cap, hanging flaccid and torn in fleshy vanes like clothing on a rotted corpse. And about him, stretching in ragged lines towards me, low black hummocks of fungal spore-balls staggered and swelled from the ground. And there, from the final fetid growth, almost at my feet, a knotted and scabbed hand reached upward, six fingered, from a fungal infection, scrabbling and scratching for purchase down the back of my ankle with febrile fingers of rot and root, fingers clutching with a burning grip before I tore free.
I stand shakily and brush dirt and mushy snow from my clothes, the chill cutting to the bone, and as I turn to look back through the portal into the city-park, I see only two glowing yellow orbs, not really eyes, more like flowers or night-bugs, dip as if bowing to me - a wry nod of a predator acquiescing the loss of its quarry - before they drop low to the ground and nod off in two different directions into the depths of the sequestered forest behind the wall.
I awoke itching, and my eyes stinging with the brightness of the light coming through my window. I scrambled blearily out of bed and looked at the clock, it was 3 AM. Parched, I walked into the bathroom to fetch some water, and that's when I saw it, staring back at me in the mirror, nodding at me over baggy skin that hangs on a frame of woody roots and soft tendrils, two yellow eyes burning in my own face, looking back at me.