The Crimson
A Ghost Story
Alright, listen up.
It’s been ten horrendous years and my fiance has finally convinced me its time to tell my story, in the hope it might exorcise some of the evil that has haunted me ever since.
She can’t deal with the screaming, the fits, and the tears.
Nor can I.
I intend to tell this story only once, so pay attention, and know that time has had no distorting effect on my memory.
Let me tell you what my unprepared teenage mind saw.
It had been the older boys' fault, of course.
Their words mixed with my curiosity had led me to the woods that day.
They set me on the path I chose to walk down.
I knew I was making a mistake: I had seen the other boys who returned changed from my destination.
Alas, my youthful arrogance was my undoing, and when the police and local parents found me some days later, they torched and uprooted those woods. I hear that these days a luxury block of flats sits upon the bones of those woods and their dark secrets; locking away the evil, or so they thought.
“Run”
The older boys said to me,
“Run and don’t stop”.
“You know what happens if you stop!” their brutish leader calls after me.
“No!” I shout back, tears streaking across my face in the wind of my flight.
“If you stop they grab you.” He continues, quieter than before.
“They grab you and take you inside.”
“All you have to do is run to the building, touch the front door and run back!” he continues, as if it were easy.
“Ignore anything else you see!” his final warning, I hardly heard.
He’d told everyone he did what I was about to do ten times already, but in truth, nobody got as far as I did.
There were two entrances into the woods: a dark path, fingers of leaf and twig interlocking above my head to form a cavernous tunnel, blocking out the light of the sky.
The second was an old wooden style, that crumbled under my weight. This was the true entrance and represented a shortcut.
Once over, darkness weighed heavy and permeated my sight as well as my mind.
My feet crunched dead leaves and wood, as branches reached out to caress me; evaluate me.
I took a deep breath and started to run again.
The rotting bodies of birds littered the place, and the stench was terrible.
Based on smell alone I concluded that nothing lived here, as I noted the silence of the place.
Not a sound save the beating of my heart and the stomp of my feet.
At that moment, a huge gust of wind blew all through the woods and straight through my confidence.
Over the rustling of foliage, I could hear a whisper of words
“bring me anotherrrr…”
fear slithered through me.
The many tall thin trees that surrounded me were poised to strike, dark scorpions hiding on a leafy ceiling, and they tore at me as I ran. Blood leaked from a scratch across my left eyebrow as salty fear slipped into my mouth. I ran onwards.
It soon became clear that there was no cabin in the woods, I would find nothing but disappointment. I sprinted onwards, disorientated, stumbling in all directions. Areas of my vision became white, others gray. It was impossible to concentrate in this world void of real colour, the trees and foliage blended to create a natural world that frightened me. Nothing seemed to live here.
As my energy started to wane things began to change.
Visions revealed themselves.
Soon I could see a tennis court with great rusting fences enclosing it, the mesh replaced with barbed wire.
An obese man dressed as a threatening clown rode a child’s tricycle around a tiny basketball hoop in the middle of the court.
The previous grey and blacks of this world had been replaced with crimson, mauve and purple.
These images made no sense, and I was afraid.
I heard wedding bells and children’s laughter. I could feel a presence other than my own. Predators were circling. I wasn’t safe.
Three red brides.
Five children wearing crimson jackets.
A cot, occupied by something I couldn’t see in a grey, concrete room.
A wheelchair smothered in the flanks of a 30-stone woman wearing black.
My eyes were closed.
I’d stopped running.
When I opened them I was presented with an old wooden door. A metal ring served as a knocker, but the door was ajar. I pushed it forwards and entered, knowing that I was breaking the rules and should return to the other boys.
Something grabs my shoulder.
“This is it, they’ve got me”, I remember thinking.
I turn and am greeted by an 8 feet tall, gangly baby. It’s daddy-long-legs body dwarfed me, and it’s awful infant head leered down to regard me.
The squid of its inky black hair reached towards me as the holes in its face where the eyes should have been lowered level with my own.
I was still screaming when they found me days later.
