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voidofwords · 2 years

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The bus is empty. It usually is this time of day.

The digital clocks stopped working a while ago, but my internal clock says it’s no later than seven in the morning, and the sun spills its first reddish light across the sky in agreement.

I’ve been up for hours. That’s part of the job. I suppose it can feel a little lonely in winter: waking up long before dawn to walk to work in darkness. I keep a flashlight in my pocket, but I never turn it on. It’s just a precaution. I think I prefer the dark, anyway. Its presence is so thick around me, it’s almost like a companion.

But even darkness goes away. The sun is rising now, as I take a turn down another abandoned road. Everything goes away.

I guess my job has always felt lonely. I’m nothing more than a cog in a machine, a servant to the endless push and pull of traffic; though right now, the only traffic is me.

People see me as an extension of this bus, a fixed part of their daily commute, more than they see me as a person. There used to be the occasional passenger who would smile and say hello, how are you, as they entered the bus.

I smile even now as I remember the old lady, Mrs. Brown, who used to take the bus every day at 9 am. She would most often sit at the very front and make idle conversation, with me and anyone else willing to indulge. I think she may have been as lonely as I was. Always said she was going to see her husband, and each day, I dropped her off at the stop by the cemetery.

She hasn’t been here for some time. I wonder if she moved away.

Sometimes the silence of the bus is suffocating. You get so used to the roar of the engine, it fades into the background. It stops being a noise altogether. I don’t turn on the radio anymore, so when the bus is empty, as it usually is this time of day, the silence is a living, breathing thing. It sits on every seat of the bus and breathes down my neck.

Then there are days like today, when the silence is almost… companionable. I hum the tune of an old song I’ve forgotten the lyrics to, and the engine hums along, and the silence, always waiting at the edge of everything, listens. Patiently. The silence knows I will stop humming eventually, and welcome it back inside the bus.

I reach the stop where old Mrs. Brown used to get on. She’s not there. No one is. Then again, I might be ahead of schedule. Without any traffic to slow me down, it’s probable. I activate the turn signal and drive to the side of the road by the bus stop. I kill the engine, and then it’s truly quiet. It’s not often I let myself sit with the silence in such an intimate way. You don’t think about how loud silence really is until it’s all you can hear.

There is a little bench next to the bus stop where Mrs. Brown used to sit and wait for my arrival. The wood has started to rot; it looks ready to collapse. It’s not safe for an old lady anymore. Someone should really fix it soon.

I think I sit there for five minutes, maybe ten. It doesn’t look like Mrs. Brown will show up today either, and I really should get going or I’ll get behind schedule. So I start up the engine again, and the silence retreats a little. Just to the seats of the bus, where it always sits.

People used to say insanity is doing something over and over again, expecting a different outcome. But I think I’m perfectly sane.

I drive until I reach the stop by the cemetery. The bus sign there has lost a brave battle to rust. It’s laying somewhere in the overgrown grass now, leaving the pole empty, naked, close to giving up itself.

I used to have my lunch break at the station not far from here, but that stop has closed. The barbed wire fences surrounding the place make it impossible to get in, and no one works at the deli anymore, where I used to grab lunch. Instead, I stop here and walk out toward the cemetery.

The air outside the bus wraps my lungs in a tight and suffocating fist, but I don’t let it bother me anymore. You can’t expect the air to be clean these days, certainly not in a place like this. Perhaps not anywhere. I wouldn’t know, my job keeps me tied down here.

There’s a perpetual fog surrounding almost everything these days, and it’s thicker here, where the dead are laid to rest. I don’t mind it so much.

I walk between the graves. There’s a limp in my step that always gets worse in the cold, but the dead aren’t going to judge me. I sit on a bench looking over a cluster of graves. This part of the cemetery is reserved for those who didn’t have any family to bury them. Small, impersonal stones are scattered across the lawn, with nothing but a name and some dates engraved. What a lonely fate. No one to remember you. No one to mourn you.

A distant part of me wonders if anyone will be there to bury me when I’m gone. I don’t dwell on it, though. It’s best not to dwell on things. I have a job to do.

On the way back to the bus, I stop next to a grave belonging to someone named Charles Allan Brown. Surely there are many people named Brown buried here, it’s not an uncommon surname. Still, I find myself picturing an old lady coming to this grave every day, bringing a fresh bouquet once a week, until one day she didn’t.

Are the dead lonely? I don’t imagine so. Loneliness is reserved for those left behind.

I walk the rest of the way back to the bus. It’s empty. It usually is this time of day.

#idk. i wrote this hi #writing #short story #writeblr #writer #fiction #post apocalypse #death

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voidofwords · 3 years

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the woods

hello, here’s some horror-esque garbage i wrote. en...joy?

Everyone in the small town known as Bliss seemed to believe the stories.

Everyone in Bliss had grown up hearing the tales passed down from generations of scared Bliss citizens. Some stories were of cults or boogeymen, or even feral animals. Others spoke of otherworldly monsters, too horrible for any person to comprehend. The people of Bliss had heard it all.

That was true: Everyone in Bliss knew, and apparently believed, the stories of the woods, and what happened to children who went in there by themselves.

Riley thought these stories were bullshit. Of course, Riley hadn’t grown up hearing the tales herself. And even if that had been the case, she hadn’t yet experienced the horrors of the woods firsthand.

“You actually believe there’s something in the woods that, what, eats kids?” Riley laughed.

Lily didn’t. “I don’t know what I believe, Riley,” she said, her voice quiet, solemn. “But I know that children have gone missing in the woods around Bliss for as long as anyone can remember.”

Riley shrugged. “Children go missing everywhere. It doesn’t mean the woods are haunted or something.”

There was something strange about Lily, Riley thought. Frankly, there was something strange about this whole town. The inhabitants of Bliss were, ironically, not particularly blissful. Lily, and most of the other kids Riley had met at her new school, were far too serious for their age.

Lily, especially. She worried far more than Riley thought any 11-year old ought to worry about anything. And in the week that Riley had known her, she hadn’t seen the girl smile even once.

Still, she liked being around Lily. Despite her fretful, unsmiling demeanour - or maybe not despite it - there was something special about her. Something that made Riley’s insides feel warm and squishy.

“I know that if you haven’t lived here very long,” Lily said, her deep green eyes staring into Riley’s, “the local stories may seem like nonsense.”

That was an accurate word for it, Riley thought. She had grown up in the city, where the dangers for children were the strangers in vans and on the street, luring them away with candy and a sense of false security. She had learnt to not walk alone after dark, and to not talk to anyone she didn’t know. Yes, stranger danger was real, but monsters in the woods?

“I don’t think they’re nonsense,” Riley said. Mostly to be nice. “Spooky campfire stories are fun. But I think you guys… take it a bit far.”

Lily’s voice was grave, and more fitting for a funeral than a casual conversation, as she spoke: “Trust me, Riley. There is nothing fun about the woods.”

Lily did not understand how someone could not fear the woods. In her mind, even someone like Riley, who came from a big city and had yet to see the terrors of the woods for herself, ought to at least be unsettled by the dark, deep forest of Bliss and the nightmare tales that accompanied it.

But Riley wasn’t afraid.

Somewhere inside of Lily, a voice - one she didn’t like but also couldn’t seem to shake - told her that Riley would soon see how wrong she was about the woods. She will learn. They all do, don’t they?

People who moved to Bliss from elsewhere didn’t tend to stay very long. When they first heard stories from the locals about the woods, they would respond with disbelief, sometimes even mockery. But sooner or later, they all learned. Sooner or later, a child would go missing, or something strange would occur in the town, and they would realize the tales of the woods weren’t just campfire stories. And usually, not long after that, they would leave.

Maybe, Lily thought, if Riley knew what had happened to Ben, she wouldn’t think of it as a joke anymore. Maybe she wouldn’t laugh at Lily for being scared of the woods, if she knew that Lily’s own brother had gone in there and never come back.

Benjamin Crawford was not the last child to have disappeared in the town of Bliss, but his disappearance was recent enough that people still remembered. Still talked about. Lily Crawford, now the same age as her brother had been when he disappeared, still got pitying looks from time to time.

She had begged Ben not to go into the woods. But Ben hadn’t believed he had any other choice. Poor, foolish Ben, who was terrified of those woods, but even more terrified of his peers. Of not being accepted. Of the stupid, popular kids thinking he was a coward.

Exactly like all of the other children who had disappeared in Bliss, they had never found a body to bury, but a funeral had been held nevertheless and Lily, nine years old then, had stood motionless in her black dress, eyes fixed on her brother’s empty coffin as they lowered it into the ground.

When Riley asked her parents what they thought of the stories about the woods, her father laughed and shook his head, and her mother told her that if ghost stories were what it took to keep Riley from wandering off alone, then sure, they could be true for all she cared.

“Everyone in Bliss seems to believe the stories, though,” Riley said over dinner.

“Everyone in Bliss is crazy,” her father answered.

Her mother gave him a stern look. “Don’t say that, Howard.”

Perhaps the people in Bliss were a bit crazy. Riley wouldn’t rule it out as a possibility entirely. But she wasn’t sure she minded, exactly. Yes, the stories about the woods, the way no one dared come near them and everyone went very quiet and serious when woods or missing children were mentioned… It was all a bit strange. But Riley also found it thrilling, in a weird way. As if she was living in one of her mystery novels, the ones her mother thought she was too young to read.

She knew none of it was real, of course. There wasn’t actually some evil, monstrous thing lurking in the woods, waiting to snatch up children. Still, she found herself wanting to learn more about the various scary stories attached to this town. Even if most of the other kids glared at her when she laughed off the possibility of those stories being anything more than that: stories.

Lily watched from afar as Riley sat and talked with an older boy. Michael, was his name. He hadn’t been a friend of Ben’s, no one had, really, no one but Lily herself. But he had been one of the boys who talked - no, bullied - him into going into the woods all by himself.

And now, Michael was talking to Riley. Lily crept closer to the two of them, until she was close enough to hear what they were saying.

“You really believe these stories about the woods?” Riley asked, a soft laugh sticking to her words.

Michael shrugged nonchalantly. “Everyone here believes there’s something in there.”

Lily didn’t understand how he could sit there and talk of the woods as if it didn’t matter. As if he hadn’t been one of the kids who had made her brother go in there. As if it wasn’t his fault that Ben was gone.

“So… what do you believe?” Riley asked.

“I think that whatever is in there, it can’t be human.” Michael sounded like he was telling a scary bedtime story to a young child. “I mean, when you look back at this town’s records, this stuff has been happening for as long as things like that has been recorded. Probably as long as anyone has lived here. Some people think this is a serial killer, you know. Or some child-stealing cult. But if you ask me, it has to be something supernatural.”

Riley laughed properly then. “What, Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monster?”

Michael laughed along with her, but he quickly stopped again. “You don’t seem scared at all.”

“I’m not.” Riley puffed her chest out proudly. Bravely. It reminded Lily painfully of Ben, who had been desperate to prove that he wasn’t scared of the woods, and had paid the ultimate price.

Or perhaps, Lily was the one who had truly paid. She was the one who had been left behind, after all.

Michael eyed Riley, like she was a puzzle for him to crack. It made Lily sick. “Well, if you’re not scared at all,” he said, “Why don’t you go and see for yourself?”

Riley met his gaze without too much laughing this time. “Into the woods?”

Michael nodded. “Yeah! Or are you too scared?” He said the last part in a voice one might use when talking to a baby.

“Why would I be scared of something that isn’t real?” Riley said, with more confidence than Lily felt she ought to have. “If I have to go into the woods to prove that your silly ghost stories aren’t real, then… maybe I will. Since everyone else here is too much of a wuss.”

Lily felt her chest constrict in the most horrid way, all the while that voice, usually buried deep inside her, came bubbling to the surface with all its satisfaction. I bet she won’t be so cocky once she goes into the woods.

If she comes back out, Lily countered, a shiver running through her. Of course, there were plenty of people who went into the woods and came back out again to tell the story. But not everyone did. Not enough.

Lily had to do something. She had to stop Riley from going into the woods, in the way she had not been able to stop Ben. She would do it for him, and for all of the other children who had never been found.

“Riley, please. You mustn’t go!”

All Riley did was roll her eyes at Lily. “Why? Because of the big bad monsters that are going to eat me?”

Lily ran to catch up with her, nearly stumbling over her own feet. “I don’t know what will happen but… I can’t let you go out there. Not because some stupid 6th-grader dared you to.”

Riley laughed. She actually laughed. “I don’t know, Lils. It would be a cool adventure, wouldn’t it? Nothing interesting ever happens in my life!”

Lily recoiled at the nickname. Lils. She didn’t want anyone calling her what Ben had called her. But she didn’t say anything about that to Riley. “I am begging you to listen.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but it made Riley stop and turn around.

“Why do you care, though?” she asked, more curious than anything. Riley always sounded like she was more interested in knowing than she was in anything else. Even her own safety, it would seem.

Why did Lily care? She felt the unshed tears burning in her eyes before she even began to speak. “Two and a half years ago, Benjamin Crawford went into those woods. He didn’t want to, Riley.” Now, the tears were spilling over and running down Lily’s cheeks in two warm, salty tracks. She fought to regain control over her shaky voice, and lost miserably, but carried on nevertheless: “Ben was scared of the woods, even more than everyone else in Bliss. But Michael, and all the other stupid, cruel kids… They bullied Ben. They made him feel like he had to go in there, into the woods. ‘What?’, they said. ‘Are you a chicken, Ben? A coward?’”

Lily doubled over, her knees hitting the ground, hard, giving out under the weight of Ben’s absence, and all of the horrible, dark feelings she had tried to bury ever since he disappeared.

Riley wasn’t laughing anymore. She knelt next to Lily, her hand hovering by her arm, like she wasn’t sure if touching her would comfort her or distress her further. “Crawford…” she said quietly. “Lily, that’s your last name, isn’t it?”

“Ben was my brother.” The words were barely intelligible through her sobs. “He went into those woods, and he never came back out, and I can’t stand idly by and watch as that happens to someone else. Not to you, Riley.”

Riley swallowed hard. Nodded. “I… I’m sorry, Lily. I didn’t know.”

Lily sat up a little straighter. Met Riley’s eyes. Her pretty brown eyes, dark as the soil after heavy rain. “Promise me you won’t let Michael and his friends get to you,” she whispered. “That you won’t go into the woods, no matter how tempted you are.”

Riley put her arms around Lily, and Lily stiffened up. When was the last time she had been hugged like that? Two and a half years ago, that was when. “I won’t go into the woods, Lily. I promise.”

At first, Lily managed to convince herself that the pounding on her window wasn’t really there. Or that it was the wind making a tree branch thump against the glass. The thought that someone, or something, was outside of her window in the middle of the night was too much for her to handle. So, she shut her eyes, and told herself to ignore it.

It was when the voice came, calling her name, that Lily could no longer ignore whatever was out there.

“Lily, open up.”

She sat up in bed, terrified of what she would find when she looked outside.

But it was only Riley, standing outside, her figure illuminated by Lily’s dim night light. Lily opened the window for her. “Riley?” she whispered, hoping her parents wouldn’t hear. “What are you doing here? How do you even know where I live?”

Riley stepped closer to the window, but didn’t climb inside. “Lily,” she whispered. Her voice had never sounded so grave, so mature, as it did now. “I just came to tell you that I’m going out there. Into the woods.”

Lily felt her heart drop all the way to her feet. “What?” she croaked. “Riley, no. You can’t. You promised.”

“Did I?” Riley said, tilting her head like she was trying to remember. “I think you’re imagining that, Lily. I don’t remember promising such a thing.”

But… But it had been just earlier that day, when they were walking home from school. “You promised,” Lily whispered. “Riley, I don’t understand… Why are you so eager to go out there all of a sudden? In the middle of the night?”

Even Ben had had the sense to go during the day. This couldn’t be happening. Did Riley have a death wish?

Riley’s lips quirked up into a smile. “I just want to. Are you going to stop me, Lily? What are you going to do?”

Lily knew that she couldn’t stop her, even if she tried. It was clear in the set of her shoulders. The way her eyes shone, even in the dark. Riley was going to go out there, and there wasn’t a thing Lily could do about it.

The sensible voice in her head, the one that had been much louder ever since Ben’s disappearance, was screaming at her to close the window and go back to bed. Riley is toying with you, she must be. And even if she isn’t, and she truly has her mind set on going out into the woods, you can’t help her.

But then there was the other voice. The one that whispered, Riley is going to go out there and she is never going to come back again and it will all be your fault.

Lily closed her eyes. Cursed herself for not listening to the sane, sensible voice. “I’ll come with you,” she whispered.

When she opened her eyes, Riley was smiling even wider. “Good,” she said. “Come.”

The further away from Lily’s house they went, the harder it became for Lily to ignore the screaming voice in her mind, growing louder with every step. Turn back! Don’t go any further.

This is how you lost Ben.

Despite it all, Lily kept walking. She couldn’t let Riley do this alone. Most of the children who disappeared had gone alone. There was safety in numbers, Lily had always been told. Even if two wasn’t a particularly high number, it would surely be better than one.

By the place where the town ended and the trees began to thicken, the darkness had enveloped them so thickly Lily could barely see anything. Thank goodness she had thought to bring a flashlight.

The narrow beam didn’t do much to illuminate their surroundings, except for a rather small circle of it. Everything else around them only seemed even darker than before. Lily tried not to picture the most horrifying things lurking right out of sight, hiddenly by the thick curtain of the night.

“Riley,” she whispered, stepping a little closer to the girl. “Are you sure we should be doing this? We could come back tomorrow, you know, during the day.”

She couldn’t see Riley’s face, but from her voice, it sounded like she was smiling. “Oh, but Lily,” she said, her voice a little too loud. It pierced through the night in a way Lily’s almost-whisper hadn’t. “This is the best time to go into the woods. When it’s dark and still. And when it’s just the two of us.”

Just the two of them. Lily clung to those words like a lifeline. She wasn’t alone out there. She had Riley.

Without another word, Riley started walking. It only took a few moments for her body to disappear from sight, cloaked in the deep, terrifying kind of darkness that only lived between trees and deep down in the ocean.

“Riley, wait!” It came out as a croaking whisper, a desperate plea. She could hear Riley’s footsteps somewhere in front of her, neither slowing down nor stopping.

Lily frantically pointed the flashlight in Riley’s direction, and followed the faint silhouette of the girl. She caught up quicker than she had expected, in only a matter of seconds.

Perhaps this was Lily’s imagination running wild, but it seemed to her like time, and distance, and all of the other things she had regarded as constants, were somehow being warped by the woods. She didn’t know if they had walked ten steps or a thousand, and she didn’t know if it had taken them one minute or several hours. It was far too easy to lose track of everything, even her own terrified breaths.

After ten minutes, or maybe two hours, or maybe several days, of walking, Lily stopped. “Riley.” The shake in her voice threatened to break it. “Riley, we should turn around now. Go back home.”

This time, thank God, Riley stopped. “Really?” she said, turning to look at Lily. “You want to go back so soon?”

Lily really wished she could see Riley’s face. She settled for finding an ounce of comfort in the girl’s slender silhouette. “Yes,” she whispered. “Please, let’s go home. You’ve proven yourself to those assholes, okay? Not that it matters, but they will certainly respect you after this.”

Riley tilted her head to the side. “Respect doesn’t matter to me, Lily. I just want you to stay with me a little longer. Okay?”

“I’m not going to leave without you, Riley,” Lily said. “It’s just…” She turned around in a slow circle. “I think we’ve gone quite deep into the woods already.”

Suddenly, Lily wasn’t sure which way they had even come from. No matter where she looked, the woods appeared the same. Complete darkness, only split up by the even darker silhouettes of tall, thin trees. “Riley,” she said, very slowly, each syllable dripping with urgency. “You know how to get us back… Right?”

She looked back at the girl. Or rather, the place where she had been standing just a moment ago.

“Riley?!” Lily spun around herself in circles. But it did not matter where she looked. Riley wasn’t there. “Riley, please. Where did you go?”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Riley could not be gone. She had been there just before. And more importantly, she wouldn’t have left Lily here all by herself. Would she?

Lily ran forward in one direction, not knowing if it was bringing her closer to Riley, or further away from her. Perhaps this was the way home. Or, perhaps, each shaky, unsteady step was taking her deeper and deeper into the woods. “Riley!” she screamed, at the top of her lungs. She kept screaming, and she kept running. She had to find Riley.

Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Lily thought she glimpsed a silhouette. And not just another tree. This had been a short figure, and it had been moving, Lily was almost sure of it. She stopped running, so abruptly she nearly toppled over, and turned towards the place where she had seen the figure. “Riley?”

There was definitely someone there, standing just out of reach of the light Lily was pointing their way. “Riley, is that you?” she called, not daring to step closer.

“Lily! Oh, there you are.” The voice, Riley’s voice, came not from the figure cloaked in darkness, but from behind Lily.

She spun around, and found Riley standing just a few feet from her, face scrunched up against the light Lily was pointing directly at her.

“Riley!” Lily dropped the flashlight and threw her arms around Riley in a tight hug. “I was so scared. I thought we had gotten lost from each other.”

Lily wanted to ask where Riley had been, why she had left Lily standing there alone, and how she had found her again. But all of that would have to wait. She let go of the girl and turned around again, to where she had seen a figure before.

If that hadn’t been Riley, then… who was it?

“Riley, I saw someone,” she whispered. She barely dared voice it, but what else was she to do? “There was someone here, I’m sure of it. I thought it was you at first, but it couldn’t have been.”

“There is no one else here, Lily. Just you and me.”

Lily shook her head. No, she had seen a figure in the dark, she was certain of that. Carefully, she took one step forward, then another. Had the person been scared away by the sound of their voices? Or were they hiding from Lily, just out of sight?

That was when Lily heard a voice. One she had been absolutely certain she would never here again. It was faint, but it was there. It called her name. “Lily.”

“Ben?”

It wasn’t possible. Lily knew it wasn’t. But that didn’t stop her from running toward the voice.

Ben had called her name. It could not have been anyone else. It couldn’t have been, it couldn’t have been, it couldn’t have been.

Lily stopped, and there he was. Even in the complete darkness surrounding her, she could see him clear as day, as though Ben himself emitted a faint glow. He didn’t look a day older than when Lily had last seen him. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except for Ben, standing right in front of her.

As she took a step toward him, ready to run into his arms, Ben shook his head, and the look in his glowing eyes made Lily stop.

“You should not have come here.” His voice seemed distant, even though he was standing a mere three feet away from Lily.

“Ben,” Lily whispered. Her voice broke. The tears shimmering in her eyes reached their limit and started down her cold cheeks. “You’re here, you’re really here.” Lily was crying uncontrollably, but she was determined to keep talking. She was scared that if she didn’t, Ben would disappear. “I can take you home. Please, let’s go, Ben. Let’s go home.”

Ben shook his head sadly. “I can never go home, Lils. But it’s not too late for you. You have to leave now, while you still can.”

“No.” Lily reached a hand toward her brother. “I can’t leave you.”

“Please, Lils. It will come after you. I… I think it might already be after you. Please, I can’t watch you become its next victim.”

Lily didn’t ask what it was. She did not want to know. Suddenly, it became very very clear to her, that she had to leave. “I need to find Riley again,” she whispered. “I can’t leave without her.”

Ben watched her carefully. “Riley?” he asked. “Who is Riley?”

“The girl I’m here with. I don’t know where she is, but she has to be close by. I need to find her before “it” gets her.”

Slowly, Ben shook his head. “Lily, there is no one else in the woods right now. You are alone. You came here alone.”

“No.” Lily shook her head frantically. “Riley!”

She spun around, and there Riley was, her face mere inches from Lily’s. Lily wanted to hug her again, but... she stopped. Took a step back, then another. Her foot caught on something and she fell to the ground, a shrill cry escaping her.

The thing standing in front of her was not Riley. It wasn’t human at all. What had first appeared as the shape of a young girl was slowly warping. Revealing its true form, Lily thought.

She was shaking with terror as she watched the once Riley-shaped being change, its limbs stretching and stretching, its innocent girl face contorting into something else entirely. A predator. A monster.

Lily tried to scream, but the sound barely reached her throat before it lunged at her.

#aaaaaa tags #too tired to give those much thought rn #writing #writeblr #original writing #horror #hallowrite #writetober

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